Mrs Abinger could not help worrying. Miss Loscoe looked terrible. Her share of Mrs Loscoe’s money had not encouraged her to relax her austerity. She couldn’t. She had gone too far. It was becoming a mania now that she must retain in her body as little food as possible.
At Seacombe, the Abingers had taken rooms in a house called Clarence Lodge, in a side street at right angles to the sea. There had been a lot to do before they left, and Mrs Abinger felt worn out and rather rocky before they even got to Paddington. She hoped she could stand the journey.
She slept, and waking at Taunton, said, in a daze: ‘The last time I was on this line with you, Jo, you were – ’
Luckily Josephine interrupted: ‘But we’ve never been in this train before, Mum. You know that.’
‘Whatever was I saying?’ Mrs Abinger, all in a flurry and bother, straightened her hat and picked up the papers which had slid off the lap of her best black silk.
‘You’re forgetting yourself, Ellie,’ George said. ‘Good thing for you I don’t choose to do the same.’
Mrs Abinger looked quickly at Jo, but she was too excited to notice what they were saying. She looked back at George. She did not trust him, especially in this ill-fitting, almost jaunty holiday mood which he had assumed after they had locked the door this morning on ‘M ZAW TEE TEA’.
He was a bomb that might one day explode and destroy her patiently built structure. Having kept Jo’s secret so long, she was beginning to think that she would never tell her now. The shock might be bad for her nerves. It would never do to upset her just when she was doing so well. What a pity the Copes could not see what a fine job Mrs Abinger had made of their Joy. For of course, no one but Joy Stretton could have become the talented, self-reliant little Miss who was now pressing her pretty nose against the carriage window.
Her self-reliance was another reason for concealment, a selfish one, which Mrs Abinger tried to repudiate. But she could not help thinking that if Jo were so independent now towards what she thought was her real mother, how much farther away might she go if she knew the truth?
Mrs Abinger kept her eye on George, who was looking at her quizzically over the slightly lower collar, which so far was his only sartorial concession to the holiday. But he had a sea green cloth cap in his bag, and a pair of brindle canvas shoes with black rubber soles. He was going to be emancipated and do the thing in style, since he had given it his blessing. He was convinced by now that the suggestion and the final decision had been entirely his.
As might be expected of the Grays’ holiday choice, Seacombe was a dull place. Most of the visitors were people like the Grays, who went there year after year, because they could not get out of the habit. It had nothing to recommend it, being neither gaily sophisticated nor peacefully picturesque. There was not much to do and very little worth looking at.
Josephine, who had never seen the sea, nor spent a night away from the flat, thought she was in Paradise. It was holiday enough for her mother to see her so delirious, although Mrs Abinger was disappointed that the terraced houses were so grey and ugly, the beach so pebbly and the little harbour spoilt by a coaling wharf and a railway siding, with foul-mouthed lightermen in squashed caps instead of quaint old salts and sou’westers.
Mr Abinger was disappointed to find no pier, no concert pavilion, no slot machines. There were no ice-cream parlours nor rifle ranges, and his initial reconnaissance of the saloon bars revealed that the talk, by which he meant the listening, was as poor as the beer. However, he was still in holiday mood. He ate haddock for breakfast, which he never would at home, cracked a joke with the waitress, and had a long talk afterwards in the garden with an old man in an invalid chair, who could not get away.
By the time he was ready to go out, Josephine had already gone looking for Pauline Gray, so he took Mrs Abinger round the town, criticizing the window displays of the grocers’ shops, pointing out where he would throw out a pier or plant a formal park. Mrs Abinger noticed a nice café where they might go for tea, since teas were extra anyway at Clarence Lodge.
George was wearing his sea-green cap and a knotted instead of a bow tie. He walked too fast for her in his canvas shoes. The sea air seemed to have gone to his head. He bought her an ice-cream off a barrow, and called ‘Good morning!’ to startled strangers. Finding that his favourite daily paper was a Western edition, he felt a pleasantly travelled man. They sat in deck-chairs on the short concrete promenade, and he treated Mrs Abinger to comical bits about the natives of Plymouth and Torquay.
Mrs Abinger did not want to read or talk or listen. It was enough just to be sitting here in the middle of the morning with nothing whatever to do.
‘I reckon this is just what we needed, George,’ she said, sitting very spread, and easing her feet in her new beach shoes. ‘A real change from London and the shop and everything. We’ve been too long without a holiday. All work and no play, they say, don’t they?’
The sun came out of a cloud, and he tipped his hat forward, in terror of sunstroke. ‘I daresay I have been working too hard, Ellie,’ he conceded. ‘It’s slow death, a one-man business in these days, with everything on one pair of shoulders. Perhaps I ought to take it a bit easier, for when all’s said and done, where would you be if I was to crock up with overwork? I wonder if I should enquire after an assistant …’ He gazed out over the promenade rail, the bigness of the ocean giving him big ideas.
‘I doubt we could afford that, dear,’ Mrs Abinger said. ‘I shall have to try and take a bit off you, to give you more free time, if you feel you need it.’
‘Need it? Of course I need it. I tell you, Ellie, a one-man business is a killing thing, a killing thing.’
He repeated this to Mr Gray, when the families met for a picnic. If Mr Gray was surprised to hear that the business was not quite the multiple store which Jo had implied, he did not show it. He said: ‘I believe you’ solemnly, resting on his heels, his hands hitching up the pockets of his yellowing white flannels, so that they looked even shorter than last year.
Watching her father covertly, Jo was pleased to see that everything was all right. He and Mr Gray, as being the men of the party, were quite bluff together and spoke of ‘the ladies’, wagging their heads. Mr Abinger even added: ‘God bless ‘em,’ and handed Mrs Gray into the car like a courtier. For the picnic, he had discarded his tie altogether and wore his shirt collar open outside his jacket, his Adam’s apple jumping about like a marble in a lemonade bottle.
Mrs Abinger, who had put off meeting the Grays as long as possible, felt as nervous as she had feared. She had passed a bad night in the so-called double bed, which she had to build out with two chairs to support her overflow. It was going to be a grilling day. She should have worn her old thin dress, instead of her thicker new one. Sitting on the high back seat of the open car, she felt herself already beginning to pour with perspiration. She would be a sight directly. Mrs Gray, with her flat figure in the biscuit-coloured linen dress with linen hat to match, looked quite cool. But Jo was much, much prettier than Pauline. Mrs Abinger held on to that.
They all waited about on the pavement outside the Grays’ flaking Gothic hotel, and Mrs Abinger, sizzling on the hot leather seat like a herring on a griddle, wondered if they were never going to start.
Mr Gray was fussing round his old green Morris tourer as if it were a Rolls-Royce, rubbing it up with bits of rag, looking in the radiator, polishing the windscreen with a chamois leather. At last, a maid in a black dress and muslin apron, very different from the slovenly girl who flung herself among the tables at Clarence Lodge and would as soon spill soup in your lap as not, appeared at the hotel door with a picnic basket.
‘Aha!’ cried Mr Gray. ‘The commissariat department.’ The basket was lashed down to the luggage carrier with as many clove hitches as if the old Morris had been a storm-bound cargo ship. The Abingers’ landlady would not provide sandwiches, so the Grays were supposed to have brought enough lunch for all, but it looked rather a small basket. Mrs Abinger hoped
there was going to be enough, for George had made quite a fuss as it was about having lunch out. It would not be deducted from their bill, and he liked the steamed puddings at Clarence Lodge. Mrs Abinger had brought some chocolate in her bag to keep him sweet-tempered.
But he did not really need studying on this holiday as he did at home. He sat in front with Mr Gray, chatting pleasantly, one elbow flung over the door as casually as if he went in a car every day of his life.
Mrs Abinger tried to make conversation to Mrs Gray. She knew Jo wanted her to be a success, but Pauline’s mother disconcerted her by answering ‘How very interring,’ as if she did not really mean it. Trying to make herself as narrow as possible on the crowded back seat, Mrs Abinger mentioned the weather, which Mrs Gray said was quite kind, but not so kind as last year. She asked if their hotel was comfortable, and Mrs Gray assented, without offering details. You could not ask the Grays questions. It made you feel inquisitive, because they were not sufficiently interested in other families to ask any themselves.
Mrs Abinger tried a domestic subject, the sort of thing she talked about with her own friends, but Mrs Gray, for the same reason that she would not answer the front door in an apron, would not talk about cooking, or the price of vegetables, or the way the High School blouses shrank. Like bodily functions, these things had to be, but one did not dwell on them.
Ordinarily, Mrs Abinger did not feel the need to talk if she had nothing to say, but the Grays put her on her mettle. They were perfectly friendly, but somehow, without being superior, they managed to make her feel inferior and uneducated in a way the Moores never had. Jo was all right. She was at home with them. She and Pauline sat with their bare arms touching, talking about botany, and Jo had just said a Latin word. George was all right. He could talk to anyone if he chose, and he was now actually discussing economics with Mr Gray. The nerve of George, and Mr Gray a banker!
Mrs Abinger wanted desperately to be in the swim for Josephine’s sake. She racked her brains, but hot days always made her head a bit hectic. Ever since that day when she had been shut too long in the kitchen with a boiling ham and had found herself pronouncing words funnily, she had been terrified of her head letting her down. She shifted her hot body on the seat, and saw to her horror that she had cracked the mica window with her arm. She held on to a looped strap, leaning forward to hide the crack, as if interested in the scenery.
Mr Gray drove very slowly, tootling along the crown of the road, so that cars behind had to sound their horns, when he would wave them on with elaborate circlings of his right arm. He made scrupulous hand signs for the slightest deviation of course, and turning to the right was a major operation, with Peter looking behind from his perch on his mother’s lap to see if anything was coming.
They passed some double gates with a board saying:
Seacombe Golf Club. Members Only
‘That’s the Golf Club,’ the Grays told the Abingcrs.
‘Play golf?’ Mr Gray asked George, who answered: ‘Not these days,’ as if he ever had. Mrs Abinger marvelled anew at the nerve of him.
‘Pity,’ said Mr Gray. ‘It’s a spifflicating course. I go in for the competition every year; got through my first heat yesterday. I got a three over bogey as a matter of fact. Sheer fluke, of course.’ He laughed, affecting modesty.
‘I daresay I could pick it up again,’ said Mr Abinger, in specting his hands. ‘One ball game’s much like another, and no one can say I don’t keep my eye in. Bowls is my game, sir.’ The subtlety of the ‘Sir’ pleased him, and he used it throughout the day. He never called a customer Sir, but he knew the word could be used in a different sense when men were men together.
They were driving parallel with one of the fairways. ‘Eleventh hole,’ the Grays told the Abingers, and Mr Gray said: ‘I was lucky enough to get a birdie there yesterday.’
‘Indeed?’ said Mr Abinger, and his wife was very proud of him, for she was sure he no more knew what that meant than she. Or did he? There was no telling what George did not know. Only the other day, he had surprised her by coming out with a knowledgeable remark about horse racing.
The sea road along which they gently bowled was open to the blazing sun. It pierced in concentrated shafts through the openwork of Mrs Abinger’s straw hat. Holding on to the strap, she leaned across Pauline to look at Jo. The child must not get one of her Heads to-day.
‘I think you should put your hat on, dear,’ she said. Jo’s face was bright pink, and even after a few days at Seacombe, her nose was peeling. Mrs Abinger had read somewhere that people with red in their hair were more sensitive to sunburn.
‘Oh Mum,’ Josephine said, and frowned.
‘I said put your hat on.’ Mrs Abinger was terrified that Jo would disobey and show her up in front of Mrs Gray, whose children always did what they were told.
‘I’m all right’ shrugged Jo. She wanted to be left alone to watch the sea, and to imagine little houses in the banked-up hedges, and picture herself living in one of these white cottages with a monkey puzzle or a palm tree in the garden.
‘You know what you are with your Heads,’ said her mother. ‘Your nerves will play you up if you take too much of the sun.’
It was no use trying to impress Mrs Gray with this. At Wimbledon, nerves were not as grand as they were in the Portobello Road. Children like the Grays did not have nerves and headaches and giddy turns. They had juvenile things like coughs or rashes or tonsils. Only grown-ups had headaches and lay down with aspirin in a darkened room.
Mrs Abinger thought Mrs Gray was trying to score off her, when she said, soon enough for the two orders to be connected:
‘Don’t lean out, Peter, you’ll get dust in your eyes,’ knowing that he would pull in his head at once, with a smug ‘Yes, Mummee’.
Mrs Gray, however, had no desire to score off her. She neither liked nor disliked her. She did not mind Mrs Abinger sitting in the corner of her car, melting sideways like a jelly as she got hotter. She did not mind taking the Abingers on a picnic, any more than she would mind if she never saw them again. She would never wonder what had become of them, any more than she had wondered, before she met them, what Jo’s parents would be like.
They were going to a famous cove. A side road ran right down to the sands, so Mr Gray parked his car at the end and they unpacked their picnic nearby. When they were away from ‘Sheringham’, the car was their home. They stayed as near to it as possible. Driving down to Devonshire, they had picnicked by the side of the main road, sitting on the running board stolidly munching, watching the cars go by with the swivel eyes they took to the Wimbledon tennis championships.
As Mrs Abinger had feared, there was not nearly enough to eat. The sandwiches of overdone beef were small and dry and buttered on one side. She prayed that George would not remark on there being no mustard. Her heart came into her mouth as she saw him help himself to three at once, and she tried feverishly to count how many were left before she took one herself. The Grays ate politely, waiting until food was passed to them. Mrs Abinger was surprised to see that Jo, who usually pounced on sandwiches and tore them apart to see what was inside, did the same.
There was a fossilized sponge cake apiece, and a woolly apple. Mrs Abinger pretended that she did not want hers, and gave them to Jo. Her family’s stomachs were of the greatest concern to her. She would have starved herself to death to keep them fed, and if she thought they were going hungry, her own distress was as gnawing as any hunger pain. They had enormous appetites. She had stretched their stomachs by always feeding them enormously. Mrs Gray, perhaps, had shrunk the stomachs of her family by feeding them sparingly. They seemed quite satisfied, but where was the pleasure of eating out of doors? The Grays never ate just for the sheer joy of eating. They ate dutifully, to sustain life.
Seeing George sounding an empty paper bag, Mrs Abinger tried to convey by nods and smiles that as soon as they got back they would go and have a really good tea at the café.
Mrs Gray took beatle-ware cups
out of the fitted picnic case from which nothing was missing. There was tea for the ladies, lemonade for the children, and – oh dear – only cider for George and Mr Gray. George had wanted to bring some beer, but Mrs Abinger had thought that Mr Gray, being a man who played golf and drove a car, would be sure to have a man’s thirst.
If only she dared to suggest that George should go back to the little inn which they had passed about half a mile down the road. She knew what beer meant to him on a hot day. His constitution needed it. He did not need her to tell him this, however. He stood up, looking all wrong in that beach setting, with his cap on quite straight, like a lid. He could not take off his waistcoat, because of his watch and chain, but he had removed his jacket, showing the pieces she had let into his shirt sleeves, because shirts that fitted him round the chest were never long enough for his arms.
‘I fancy,’ he said, and Mrs Abinger knew that he felt a little awkward, because he put on his stagey voice, ‘that I shall betake me to Ye Olde Pig and Whistle for a little light refreshment. How about you, sir?’
Mrs Abinger watched Mr Gray’s smile for any hint of superiority. ‘No, I thank you,’ he replied, suiting his language to George’s. ‘This is my tipple.’ He waved a cider bottle as if it were an Indian club.
‘You astound me, sir,’ said Mr Abinger. ‘You don’t know what you miss.’
‘What you’ve never had, you never miss,’ said Mr Gray, preparing himself for sleep. Daddy always had a little nap after a picnic lunch. When it was time for him to wake up, one of the children would bury him with sand, as if he were a father in a book.
‘You mean you’ve never even tried the stuff?’ Mr Abinger stared down at him with bulging eyes.
‘Never,’ said Mr Gray contentedly.
Josephine spoke up suddenly. ‘Oh Dad,’ she said, ‘you don’t want to go off there. You don’t want to go off after beer when we’re having a picnic’
Joy and Josephine Page 17