‘I know.’ Joy put her hand under the table. ‘I’m sorry. I was bored though. I got thinking of all the things going on, and me not there.’ It might be a Friday afternoon, market day down the Lane, and the crowds and the banter and the bargains to be found. Although it was wonderful to be able to sail in and out of any shops and order what you liked regardless of cost, it took half the fun and all the triumph out of shopping. Joy had found that out already.
‘Have you ever eaten jellied eels, Alexander?’ Joy asked.
‘Indeed I have, Miss Joy.’ There was nothing Alexander had not done. ‘At Hoxton, that would be.’
He had told Joy about his boyhood, and it intrigued her vastly to know how he had come from a newspaper round in Hoxton to this recherché state. ‘By dint of much studying,’ he would answer. ‘Both of the printed word and the book of life.’
This was not good enough for Joy. She asked Rodney about it. ‘He’s pulling your leg,’ he said. ‘He never came from Hoxton.’ It was the first he had heard about it, and even if it were true, he did not want to hear now. Alexander did not come from anywhere. He just was.
‘At Hoxton,’ Joy asked him once, ‘did they call you Alexander? Were you christened that, or is it your surname?’
‘Indeed, Miss Joy,’ Alexander cleared his throat and selected another spoon to polish, ‘it hardly seems to matter now. Nobody knows. Some call me Mr Alexander, as it might be Mr Raymond the coiffeur, a tribute to one’s specialized position. Some call me Alexander, with a hint of dominance, as who should say: “My man”, as it might be to a chauffeur or a gardener. Some, like Sir Rodney, use Alexander as one might to a friend. Some again, those who have not quite arrived, for instance, but would like to, call me Alexander with a hint of the rollic, the verbal back slap.’ His great angel-wing shoulder blades drew together as if they felt the distasteful smart, ‘as if to imply: “What a lad am I, so democratic with the lower orders.”’
‘No, but which is it?’ Jo insisted. ‘What was your father’s name?’
‘Ah well, that’s where it is, Miss Joy. My father’s name was Bugg, which would never do in Mount Street, so you see the one name, culled from the late beloved Queen of pink rose fame, has to do for two.’
Joy laughed. ‘And how do I sound when I say Alexander?’
‘Well, you see, it’s different with you and me. We’re on the same level, because we’ve neither of us got a level. We float with the tide, belonging nowhere, not having roots like the weeds and water lilies.’
‘But I do belong! I’m Joy Stretton. I’ve told you so, and proved it a million times.’
‘Very good, Miss.’ Alexander bent his head over the silver, launched into a fury of polishing, and would say no more.
In the summer, Rodney took Joy abroad to complete her education. They went to the right hotels in the right places in all the right countries of Europe. Rodney dressed and, behaved exactly the same in all of them, had the same things for breakfast and went to bed at the same time. Joy got terribly bored with him at times, but he was pleased with her, and by August, he was beginning to let her go about and have fun and see people as well as pictures and churches. Joy was enjoying herself enormously, when the Munich crisis sent Rodney scuttling for home in terror of being caught in the middle of a European war.
When the scare gave way to uneasy peace, Alexander sorrowed for England’s honour, but Rodney rejoiced that nothing, after all, was going to interfere with his cult of Joy. He was going to launch her with a grand party, which would be telephoned about for days afterwards.
Joy was nervous, and spent hours discussing with Alexander what she should say and do, what jewellery to wear, how many drinks she could have and whether she must pretend she did not smoke; who was coming, and why, and what she had to call them. Life was much more complicated nowadays. Rodney had been through it all with her, like a coach preparing a prize pupil for examination, but Joy did not like to keep asking him things. She felt she sometimes bored him, and wondered whether he ever regretted having taken her on. It was the idea of her, and of himself as a Pygmalion-cum-Svengali that he enjoyed, but to see her at the wrong times – at breakfast, for instance, or when she was feeling and looking off colour, or he pettish – was not part of his dream. He liked to know that she was in the flat, and there when he wanted company. He liked her to be domesticated if he were feeling cosy, to prattle artlessly if he were feeling avuncular, or to be calm and sophisticated if he were feeling suave; but he did not want her all the time in any of these roles, so she tried to keep out of his way.
She did not mind. By now she knew all there was to know about him, and that having money and a title did not make you more exciting than people who had neither. However, she was as fond of Rodney as anyone could ever be, and knew that he was as fond of her as he could ever be of anyone. He was very generous. He had done an incalculable amount for her, and she tried to please him. It was the least she could do.
He was very proud of her at the party, as well he might be after the hours she had devoted to her appearance, with Alexander summoned to give last-minute judgement and pluck an invisible hair from the shoulder of her sequin-laden dress. Rodney had given her diamond shell ear-rings for her delicate ears, and her hair was piled high like a torch, to display them. The black dress, its bodice glittering like chain mail, looked as if it had been sewn on to her; brows and lashes were works of art, and her clever make-up did not hide the beauty of the skin underneath.
She knew that she looked stunning, and wished Mrs Abinger could see her. She often thought of her foster-mother, but mostly when she wanted admiration or comfort, as once she had run to her with a good mark from school or a cut finger. But last time she had been down the Portobello Road, Mrs Abinger had been embarrassingly admiring and too humble, and her father had said: ‘Huh, what have you come back for – slumming?’ she should not have gone in her fur coat and her new sports car, although it had been worth it for the sake of Kitty’s face, and of roaring round to Denbigh Terrace to set their tongues chattering there.
She took a last look in the mirror and thought in sudden fright: Is this me? Won’t people know that I don’t feel like this inside? She dabbed a touch of scent on her upper lip so that she could smell her expensive self all the time and went down the passage with her graceful, trained walk, telling herself that it did not matter what her inside felt like as long as her outside looked like this.
Rodney had planned her entrance. He brought her in when the room was already half-full, leading her forward by the hand with the hey presto air of Doctor Coppelius revealing his doll at last. The party paused for a moment like a film stopped in mid-reel. People stared, and Joy thought she was going to blush, but before the introductions were done, someone she knew claimed her, others closed round and the party clattered into life again as everyone resumed their drinks and talk.
Rodney always enjoyed his own parties more than other people’s. He was in his element now, rotund in a midnight blue dinner jacket, twittering from group to group, leaving an unfinished sentence in mid-air so that it seemed like wit, flattering a woman with his eye on the next guest being announced, never far from Joy, picking up bits of her talk, viewing her from all angles, his antennae quivering for every hint of what people thought of her.
They did not disappoint him. They pushed through the crowd to congratulate and question him; the men waggish and confidential, the women overloud to show they were not jealous.
‘You dark horse,’ they told him, ‘hiding this delicious niece – ’
If she is your niece.’
‘Of course she is, you disgusting man.’ Rodney’s voice mounted towards a delighted yelp. ‘Joy, come and tell them. She’s been at finishing school abroad, haven’t you, poppet?’
‘That’s right,’ said Joy, and her eyes widened with horror as she sensed Alexander, shocked at her elbow, and realized what she had said. Nobody had noticed. They were all talking too much themselves, which just showed that Uncle Rodn
ey need not be so meticulous about what you could and could not say. She was all right. People liked her. They were showering invitations on her already, and life was going to be fun. She reached to Alexander’s tray for a drink, but he swung it deftly out of reach.
‘Go slow,’ he murmured, without moving his bloodless lips. ‘You’ve got to keep your wits about you.’
So she must, for people kept asking her about her family, and where she had lived, and saying that if she had been at school at Lausanne, she must have known Peggy and Joyce. She had to keep the watertight story which she and Rodney had concocted and rehearsed until she was word perfect in her own history. Lies and exaggeration came easily to Joy; she had played with them all her life, but they had not needed to be as consistent as this one.
‘Why, there’s my fabulous Alexander!’ cried a female who was either as silly as her hat, or slightly drunk. ‘I’ve been trying to bribe him away from Roddie for years,’ she told Joy. ‘I’ll get you yet, man: you’d better watch out.’ She wagged a finger under his huge nose, which looked as though it had a drop on it until you saw that was part of the flesh. Alexander looked over her head like a mastiff in a Landseer picture seeing miles and miles beyond all this to the sea and the clean horizon.
The woman’s giggle died away and her face dropped as if Harley Street had never raised it. Even her hat seemed to wilt like a melting candle under Alexander’s scorn. The heir to a peerage, who had been going to take another cocktail from the tray, drew his hand away and went nervously in search of whisky. Joy had felt this herself about Alexander. He could make you feel inferior without a word or a look, just by being there. Suddenly she felt, and wondered if it was only the champagne cocktails, that Alexander was Good. He was like the stranger in the Passing of the Third Floor Back. He showed people up just by being himself.
She wanted to speak to him, but he had threaded onwards with his tray. Feeling lost, she turned to the first man she saw and asked him to get her a drink.
After the party, a dozen or so of them went out to supper and then on to a night club. They had a lot more champagne. Joy was not caring who she was nor how she behaved, but she seemed still to be Joy Stretton and to behave all right without conscious effort. She relaxed, but one detached fragment of her mind that was not chattering and fooling and thinking everyone’s remarks as funny as they did themselves, thought how silly Uncle Rodney was when he had had too much to drink.
It did not suit him to be giggly, so she leant over and showed him her diamond watch. ‘Nearly your bedtime, darling. Don’t worry about me if you want to go. Someone will see me home.’
‘Bags I,’ said the athletic young man next to her, who had never really outgrown school.
‘My dear, I can’t go home yet,’ squeaked Rodney. ‘I’m just going to have bacon and egg. Too much heaven.’ And then suddenly he was being the great Panjandrum and searing the waiter for bringing unskinned tomatoes when everyone knew he had to have his tomatoes skinned. It was one of his things.
None of the party paid any attention to him. Joy thought fleetingly that this was sad, since he was paying. They were bothering about her though, which just showed something-or-other, she couldn’t quite remember what; but it was something about all the times he had lectured and criticized and kept her cloistered.
‘Like a nun,’ she said to the athletic young man with whom she had got up to shuffle on the square yard of unlit dance floor.
‘Yes, darling,’ he said, his hand like a huge hot sponge in the small of her back. ‘Maria Monk.’
To-morrow, she could rebel from Rodney’s domination. She would do what she liked and go where she liked with anyone she chose. Who was he to dictate? But to-morrow, Rodney, seen in a spotted silk dressing-gown at midday was very moody indeed. He shot at her on his way to the bathroom and Eno’s: ‘Don’t forget your dancing lesson at two, and your hair’s a mess,’ just as if there had never been a party, and she had never been a bigger success than him at all.
3
Sometimes, for want of anywhere else to go in the evening, Norman Goldner went to see Mrs Abinger. He needed a little mothering. His own mother had died from overwork several years ago, and his father was doing a stretch for battering a night watchman.
Mrs Abinger had always liked him and regretted Jo’s cavalier treatment of him in the old days, although it was a good thing she had not been committed to him at the time when she took up with Sir Rodney. It might have been awkward. She was worlds away from him now, so because poor Norman had been left behind, Mrs Abinger would make him welcome and let him tell her about his hazards and hopes and made him cups of tea. Norman only came when he knew it was Kitty’s and Mr Abinger’s night for going to the pictures. Kitty was after him, he knew, with a gleam in her pale blue eye, and he was scared of her.
One evening, when he was sitting in Mr Abinger’s chair drinking tea and eating cake so hungrily that Mrs Abinger wondered whether she could cut another slice without Kitty noticing that the Dundee had dwindled, her sister-in-law, Phyll Abinger, came up with a copy of The Times.
‘You seen this, Ellie?’ she asked. ‘Vi brought it home from the waiting-room at the shop. Here, I’ll read it out if you can’t find your specs. This’ll interest you too, young Norman Goldner.
‘“The passenger list of the s.s. Queen Anne which sailed from Tilbury yesterday for the Mediterranean included so-and-so and so-and-so and so-and-so, and” – here we were – “Sir Rodney Cope and Miss Joy Stretton.”’
‘There!’ She looked up triumphantly, but Mrs Abinger though gratified at Joy’s fame, wished that Phyll had not read it in front of Norman. He never talked of Joy. His hurt was too deep.
Phyll persisted, not seeing how he fidgeted: ‘Fancy that, Norm. Our Jo going on a Mediterranean cruise! Whoever would have thought it to see her in the old days? Remember how she used to muck about with you round the market, and them games you got up to at the Scrubs? Talk about laugh! She was up to anything, that kid; I always said she’d go wrong or go far.’
‘Oh, yes,’ said Norman fiercely. He got up. ‘Must be getting along, Mrs Abinger. Got some work to do. Cheerio. Thanks for the tea and that.’
‘Well, whatever’s bitten him?’ asked Phyll, when they had heard him clatter down the stairs. ‘Do I smell or something?’ She sniffed at the moulting fur lapels of her coat. ‘Perhaps it is a bit high.’ She flopped into the chair Norman had left and stuck out her long gnarled legs, easing her feet in the man-sized shoes.
‘He doesn’t like to speak of Joy,’ Mrs Abinger said, ‘that’s where it is, poor fellow.’
‘Christ,’ said Phyll, who lacked imagination. ‘Why ever not? Anyone would think the girl was dead.’
‘She is, for him.’ Mrs Abinger raised her bosom in a sigh. ‘Though between you and me, he’d have her back still, if the chance offered. He doesn’t realize, not having seen her, the heights she’s flown to. Just as well he didn’t catch sight of this book Doris Evans brought me.’ She showed Phyll a copy of the Tatler, which opened automatically at a photograph of Joy in a strapless white dress billowing round her as she sat on the stairs at a dance. ‘I wouldn’t have wanted him to see that gentleman sitting with her so possessive. Freddie Rigby they call him; she often speaks of him when she’s here. They’ll be coupling their names soon, no doubt.’
‘Looks as if he stank of money,’ said Phyll, handing back the magazine.
‘Oh yes,’ said Mrs Abinger proudly. ‘His folk are the biscuit people. Rigbys of Oxford, you know.’ Mrs Abinger had become very well up in high life since the newsagent’s wife had been bringing her back numbers of glossy magazines. ‘I’ve no doubt he’s going on this cruise too.’
‘That’ll bring him to the point.’ Phyll wagged her head. ‘It’s the jiggling of the engines, Reg used to tell me, when he had that butchering job with the Union Castle. It does something to a man.’
Freddie Rigby had not gone to the Mediterranean with Joy. It was principally to deflect her from him th
at Rodney had planned the Whitsun trip.
Joy had had a wonderful winter, with endless parties and plenty of young men, some of them highly suitable. A good marriage was part of Rodney’s plan for her. Bobby Slade might have done, or the eldest son of Sir Harold Wharton, who was painting everyone’s portrait nowadays, or the Hinxworth boy, although he would never get near the title with all those brothers. There was an actor too, whom Rodney could have stomached at a pinch, and that legal bird, who was well on the way to being the youngest K.C. of his day.
But of all people, she had to single out a parvenu, personable enough in himself, perhaps, in spite of his taste in cars, but whose father had led in a winner at Ascot last year in a black topper, and – yes, my dear, because Noni Torrance had seen them – boots.
Joy had met Freddie through her paternal grandmother. Rodney had not heard of Mrs Stretton since the death of her son Geoffrey and the supposed death of his baby had severed the tenuous link between the two familes. She had appeared on the scene again when she got wind of Joy’s existence, and had taken her, infuriatingly, to her bosom. Rodney feared her influence.
The fact was that his sister Rose had married beneath her. Geoffrey Stretton, who had been at the right school and college, had come under the influence of enough of the right people to pass for all right himself. His mother, however, was appalling; Rodney would never forget her at the wedding. Rose should never have done it. The Copes had been dreadfully upset at the time, and now here was Joy trying to go the same way, picking a not Quite when there were so many Quites to be had.
A kind of nostalgie de la boue. Rodney had worked wonders with her; she could go anywhere now without disgracing the Copes. She was chic and intelligent and delightful to look at, prettier than her mother had ever been, but there was that taint in her from her father’s side. It had accepted the un-Copelike circumstances of her past life, and might ruin her future yet.
Joy and Josephine Page 31