As he came out of the lift, stepping as high as if the two inch gap was a chasm, she accosted him. He shut his eyes for a moment, but she was still there when he opened them.
‘Mr Abinger,’ she said, her voice as sharp as her nose, her scandal-mongering eyes darting from side to side, ‘I must speak to you.’
‘How now,’ he said. ‘What is this vision of Oriental splendour?’ He bowed from the waist, and passengers following him out of the lift pushed him aside.
‘I’ll tell you about it on the way home,’ Miss Loscoe said. ‘Come along. There’s no time to lose.’
‘You wish me to escort you.’ His eyebrows rose. Old Loscoe and he had hardly exchanged a civil word in their lives. ‘Delighted, Madam.’ He offered her his arm, but she stepped away. She had not touched a man for years.
‘Come on, come on,’ said the lift man wearily. He was tired of passengers on the evening shift who wandered out of his lift in a beery dream and had to be called back for their tickets. Mi Abinger went through all his pockets, his face lengthening at the thought that he might have to pay again. Miss Loscoe waited, swinging her beaded bag and tapping a shoe like a yellow canoe.
The passengers waiting to go down in the lift were beginning to get restive, when the lift man said: ‘I suppose you never put it in your hat band, oh no.’ Mr Abinger removed his hat, discovered with some surprise his ticket adorning it like a sportsman’s pheasant feather, and handed it over grandly as if it were a visiting card.
‘Some people,’ said the lift man. He clanged his gates and was borne asunder, deriding Mr Abinger’s boots as his face passed their level.
Miss Loscoe took George down the hill much faster than he liked. It was only nine o’clock, and he had thought of calling in at the Sun. As he slowed down by the swing door, she said: ‘Come along!’ and shook her reticule behind him with a noise like a bag full of curtain rings.
‘What’s the idea?’ he asked. ‘Why am I in custo – custody? What do you want with’ – he hiccupped again, as he jolted off a misjudged kerb – ‘me?’
‘I felt it my duty to warn you,’ she said, gliding just ahead of him on her stick-like legs. ‘There’s things been going on you wouldn’t believe. I’ve never seen anything like it, and Ellie a party to it all, I declare, as if there were no shame in her.’
‘Ellie?’ Mr Abinger was fuddled. ‘Things going on? What on earth are you talking about, woman? I’ve had a tiring journey. I’m in no mood for these riddles.’
‘You’ll see,’ she said, grim-lipped. ‘We’ll catch them red-handed if we hurry.’ He had to trot to keep up with her, his suitcase bumping his legs. Several times he stumbled and swore, and Miss Loscoe began to realize that he was not entirely sober. She, Dot Loscoe, down the Portobello Road with a tipsy man! It was a daring evening for her, and looked like being a rewarding one. She had been waiting for this for two days. That was why she had put on her finery, to celebrate.
The Portobello Road keeps its street lamps dim and far apart, like a raddled courtesan her boudoir lights. In the tricky twilight, Mr. Abinger’s eyes were on his feet, so he did not see the bright haze that gave warning of his home before he could see it round the curve of the road.
Taken unawares, the shock brought him up short on the opposite side of the cross roads.
‘There!’ cried Miss Loscoe, poised with outflung arm, like an ornamental lamp. He stood rooted, sagging at the knees, his head thrust forward and his jaw slack. Now he really was seeing things. He’d got ‘em. Delirium tremens could conjure no greater horror than this.
It was after nine o’clock, but the Corner Stores was still in a fairground blaze of light, and doing a roaring trade. Open? It was practically exposed to the four winds of Heaven. Half the stock in the shop must be outside to make a show like this.
The doorway was a bower of ironmongery, hung all about with kettles, saucepans, strainers, ladles, and the old iron fish steamer that had not seen the light of day for years. In front of this, out-works of breakfast cereal and biscuit tins had been built out on to the pavement, and between them ran an improvised counter of crates and cartons piled with every variety of bottle and tin and jar that a grocery store could yield. From what could be seen through the ebb and flow of the crowd, the front of this counter was hung with large notices in bolder, cruder poster lettering than ever was sanctioned in Miss Wym-per’s art class:
You Want It? We’Ve Got It!’
‘Corner Stores for Quality and Courtesy!’
‘Our Rice
Is Nice
Our Spice
Is Twice
As Nice
As Merchandice
At Twice
The Price.’
Against a stack of buckets, almost as high as a man, leaned a blackboard with a deformed pointing hand, ‘REAL ALLY, SALE PRICE 3/11¾. IT’S MURDER.’
The Corner Stores had out-Ellisoned Ellison’s. Moreover, Ellison’s had closed long ago, and the people who were jostling and joking here on the cluttered pavement were their customers, the kind whom Mr Abinger had never wanted, and never got. Improvident women who left their week-end marketing until the last moment; factory girls and floosies; rough women from the Buildings and the railway Dwellings, with grey, snotty children who should have been in bed. Not respectable decently dressed women from the residential neighbourhood, who liked to shop quietly where they were known, with a list and goods delivered, but all the cheery hoi polloi of the Lane, who liked to shop where they could get a halfpenny knocked off the price and a bit of a joke besides.
Not housewives who had their regular order of best Darjeeling every week, and coffee freshly ground, but women who had to be incited to it by war cries on the very plate glass of the windows, in dripping whitewash letters:
‘Why Pay More?
Buy Our Tea
And You Will See
It’s Better Than the Two and Four.’
‘A Kick in Every Kup of Korner Stores Koffee.’
Lights blazed behind the glass as if it was Christmas, as indeed it might be, for all the old tinsel decorations were up, and the window display, instead of Mr Abinger’s symmetrical little constructions of the duller commodities like scouring powder and carpet soap, was a joyous riot of all the most colourful goods in the shop, marked down to cut-throat prices.
The big golden bell, which came out every year, hung in the centre, radiating coloured paper chains like a sun. Every light in the place was on. It streamed out through the open shop door, and from both windows a block of solid white light held off the gathering dark. As if that were not enough, a naphtha flare, begged from one of the barrow boys, was fixed precariously over the counter, and in its leaping light, Jo’s hair was like a burning bush. Beside her was Herbert Merriman, ghastly white from excitement and the garish light of the flare, his hair tufted, his body submerged from neck to heels in one of Mr Abinger’s own aprons!
It was this crowning outrage that gave Mr Abinger back the use of his horror-struck limbs. With a roar, he plunged into the road, scattering the crowd with his swinging suitcase. Half-way across, a hail from above stopped him with a backward jerk of his head.
The sitting-room window was open at the bottom, with the curtains undrawn. The light from within aureoled the untidy grey head of Mrs Abinger who, with her bosom spread on the sill, was leaning beneficently out over the scene like a Ruben’s angel.
Mr Abinger tipped his head farther back to see her from under his hat brim. Word went round the crowd, and they began to draw back, to watch and listen. Jo and Herbert Merriman watched too, motionless as lit figures in a tableau.
As Mr Abinger’s head snapped back, he felt the alcohol reeling through his brain like fumes in a shaken retort. Ferociously, he shook his head to clear it. It was all part of the nightmare that the airy beatitude of the farewell party should turn on him and make the piecing together of words as difficult as if the letters were being shaken up in the kaleidoscope of his brain.
‘Ellie!�
� he shouted. ‘Whassa – whassa meaning of this?’
‘Surprise for you, George.’ She beamed down at him. ‘All Jo’s idea. She done it all herself. No – but wait till you hear – ’ as he yammered at her. ‘We’ve taken a week’s money in two days! What do you think of that? We knew you’d be pleased.’
Seduced by Jo’s persuasion, excited by the adventure, her business prudence shakier than of old, she had let herself believe what Jo told her, that George would not mind once he saw the results. It was the dawn of a new era of prosperity, and she smiling over it like the rising sun.
The smile was struck from her face, and she recoiled, knocking her head on the window sash as Mr Abinger let out an animal bellow that made the crowd draw back still farther, their exclamations merging into a drawn-out ‘a-ah!’
He stood alone in the roadway, trammelled by a Homburg hat, a mackintosh, and a fibre suitcase, but the freedom of the Furies was in his working face. The light of the flare dramatized deep shadows under his nose and tilted cheekbones, and as he lowered his head, his eyeballs glittered like a pantomine demon.
The crowd had melted away from the counter, and he and Jo looked at each other. ‘Well Dad – how d’you like it?’ Her voice began bravely and quavered. She put out a hand to feel for Herbert. ‘Don’t you think we – DAD!’
She screamed at the top of her voice as he charged at the counter, laying about him with the suitcase, scattering tins, crates and boxes, breaking bottles, and felling Herbert Merriman, who had jumped in front of Jo and pushed her out of the way as her father charged. The naphtha flare came crashing down, and in a second, a packing case had gone up in a sheet of flame. All the women were screaming as Mr Abinger, lashing about like a demon in hell, battered and trampled and bellowed among the burning wreckage of Jo’s enterprise, until a rolling tin spread-eagled him backwards into the gutter, his suitcase skidded away, and the women closed in on him like a lynch mob.
The crowd had dispersed, happy with something to talk about for weeks. Miss Loscoe, satisfied, had crawled into her basement, the tarnished turban tottering and the ear-rings swinging crazily as she lolloped her head about in glee. Before she could stop herself, she had eaten wildly of the first food that came to hand, and then rushed in horror for the senna pods, to cancel out her folly.
The fire engine, the crowning sensation of the evening, had clanged up dramatically and gone away sulkily, disappointed to find only the charred remains of smashed packing cases. Mrs Abinger was in bed with a rocketing blood pressure. Herbert Merriman was in the casualty ward of Ducane Road Hospital having stitches put into the cut on his head.
Jo had insisted on going with him, and when they would not let her stay any longer, she walked all the way home, crying along the street through which she had so often run with the Moores to meet the Goldners at the hut on Wormwood Scrubs. By the time she reached home, she had no more tears; only an isolated sob came shuddering up now and again to rend her like a hiccup, and stab at the aching side of her head. Outside the shop, a policeman was taking notes connected with the charge to be made for obstructing the public highway. She stepped over the mess on the pavement and went inside.
The lights were out now. The street lamp outside patterned the floor with the shadow of the gold bell and the paper chains. In the shadows above, the half emptied shelves were like a gap-toothed mouth. She did not at first see her father hunched on a stool with his elbows on the counter, eating biscuit after biscuit in the ravening aftermath of rage. The crunching of a ginger nut stopped her in fright at the door of the store-room.
‘Who’s there?’ She swung round. ‘Oh – it’s you, Dad. I–’she made a sound that came out more like a sob than a laugh. ‘I thought it was the mice.’
‘Mice,’ he said thickly, through the biscuit, ‘will be all that will come here now.’
‘It’ll be all right, Dad. You’ll see. It won’t make no difference. People will come. They liked it. I had them all coming. They all said it was a good idea.’
‘I don’t want to talk about it,’ he said, because he did not know what to say. He had railed at her so often for harmless things that a major stimulus to wrath found him speechless. ‘You done what you done,’ he said. ‘You flew in the teeth of my expressed wishes. You lost me half my stock and doubtless all my customers. Well, now you see.’ She waited. ‘Now you see,’ he repeated helplessly and sought solace in the biscuit tin.
‘It would have been all right,’ she said, talking to him from the shadows of the inner doorway, ‘if you hadn’t come along and acted so hot. I was doing lovely. I thought you’d be so pleased, and see I was right after all to want to be up to date. All the money we took. I thought you’d be so pleased. We was doing so well and then you come along and spoil it all.’
‘Oh yes,’ he said in his boots. ‘It was my fault, I’ve no doubt. It’s always my fault. I’ve given my life, brain and body to this business, and you, an ignorant kid, come and knock it all from under me.’
He made it sound so pathetic that Jo stepped forward and said sincerely, ‘I’m sorry, Dad, honest. I meant it right. I thought you’d be so pleased – ’
‘Don’t keep saying that!’ He raised his head in a sudden flare of temper. Something that he had not noticed before struck him as unusual. What was it? Some noise. … He listened. No. There was silence except for the distant sobbing song of a line of men and girls tacking home from kerb to kerb down the Portobello Road.
‘There’s something different,’ he said. ‘What is it?’
‘What do you mean, Dad? I don’t hear – ’
‘The door!’ he cried. ‘What have you done to the door?’
‘I hitched it back, that’s all, when we were outside. I’ll lock it.’ She crossed to the open door.
That was the unusual thing. The open door and – silence.
‘What,’ he said, and his voice was slow with menace, ‘what have you done with my buzzer?’
‘That?’ she said lightly. ‘Oh, I took it off. You’re glad of that anyway. You were always cursing it and saying you’d have it off. Well, we done it, Herbie and me. It was easy.’
‘You did what? Do you know it cost me the best part of five pounds to have that fixed, sixteen – no seventeen years ago? That buzzer was one of the most expensive fittings of the shop. Oh, it’s too much; it’s too much for any man to stand.’ He could have wept. He was quite sober now, but weak. Into the buzzer he crystallized his entire sense of loss. It might have been his first and only love.
‘Well,’ Jo said helplessly. ‘I’m sorry, Dad. I’m sorry. I didn’t know. I thought you’d be so pleased.’
‘I’m never going to try and please him no more,’ she told Herbert. ‘I’m never going to try at anything.’ She had gone to see him on visitors’ day, bearing Mr Abinger’s message that he had got the sack.
The counterpane over him was almost as flat as if the bed were empty. He looked more like a clown than ever, with his face as white as if it were made up with chalk powder, his mouth smiling without his eyes, a tuft of hair sticking straight up above the bandage. He lay flat, with his eyes swivelled round to where Jo sat by the bed. They talked in undertones, and the man in the next bed, who had no visitors, tried to listen.
‘What you going to do then?’ Herbert asked.
‘Oh I’ll go on at the shop. Someone’s got to. I don’t care. I’ll do the work, to make up to Dad because of the money, but I shan’t try with it. I’m finished with ambition and that.’
‘You was always so ambitious,’ he sorrowed.
‘Not any more. I learned my lesson. What you going to do, Herbie?’
‘Stay here for a while, of course. Got to. The grub’s all right, and you’ll come to see me sometimes, Jo! Good bit of luck visiting days is early closing days,’ he said, his face brightening as if it were a miracle, and not especially designed by the hospital to suit the neighbourhood. ‘Then I’m going to me sister’s up North, the one that keeps a paper shop. I can help her with
the deliveries – light work and that.’
‘That’s good then, Herbie,’ she said.
‘It’s not,’ he said. ‘It’s bad. I shan’t see you.’
Josephine looked down at her hands without answering. A nurse came to the bed, and she jumped up in awe of her starched authority.
‘I’m afraid you’ll have to go now, dear,’ she nurse said. ‘He’s not allowed to talk too much, and there might be another visitor wanting to see him.’
‘There won’t be,’ Herbert said, but she had gone to the next bed.
‘Good-bye then,’ said Jo.
‘Good-bye,’ said Herbert and they shook hands, his white paw limp in her strong grasp.
When she had gone, the man in the next bed leaned on one elbow, eager for a chat. ‘That your daughter, chum?’ he asked, jerking his head towards the double doors at the end of the ward.
‘Me daughter?’ Herbert smiled. ‘No, chum, that’s my girl.’
Jo did not try and Mr Abinger did not try, and the Corner Stores went rapidly downhill. Many of their old customers had only come to see Ellie, and now that she was nearly always upstairs, there was no point in coming to a shop that was always out of stock of what they wanted, and where Mr Abinger and Josephine, bickering all day long, moved about in a listless, unwilling way as if they did not care whether they sold anything or not. The rats began to leave the sinking ship.
New customers came seldom and did not come again. The peeling paint outside the grimy doorstep and the spotted windows where bottles and packets faded from prolonged exposure were harbinger of the dissolution within. The floor was dirty, the counter stained, the bacon machine incurably coagulated. Cobwebs obscured the great old mottled canisters on the top shelf, of which Mrs Abinger had been so proud. The back store room galled her every time she passed through. It had never been like that in her day. Sometimes, when she was left alone in the evening, she crept downstairs to tidy up, but it had gone too far, and she could not lift the piles of broken boxes and empties that should have gone to the dustman long ago.
Joy and Josephine Page 21