If one could stay in a deep hot bath for ever, life would have no problems. It was the perfect refuge. All this, she thought, all this, as she lay in scented foam, too tired to wash, and looked at the green tiles and the bathrobes big as blankets and the chromium and the wall that was just one huge engraved mirror. I argued that it was wrong to live like this, when there was no chance of having to give it up. Now, I’m not so sure. I don’t suppose she has a bathroom at all. They don’t look as if they even washed much. I’ll never bear it. I might have to. Need I? Oh God, what shall I do? I can’t cope with this alone.
If only Alexander were here, he would know what she ought to do. He always knew what to do. But Alexander was hundreds of miles away, levelling an airfield in Scotland.
And then suddenly, just when she needed him, there he was, just as he always had been.
She was riding despondently along in the last of the twilight, still undecided whether to go to the Winchester Arms. Another mile to go before she need decide, another half, a quarter. She slowed down as she got into Chiswick. She need not decide until she actually got there, but if she did go in, what was she going to say? Perhaps they would have gone. She had purposely left late, hoping to salve her conscience by going in, and making the fault theirs for not waiting.
Only the road now along the railway wall, then the traffic lights and round the corner to the Winchester Arms, and still she had not decided. The lights changed to red, and she put a foot to the ground and leaned her arms on the handlebar. A few pedestrians were crossing. The last was a man holding a child’s hand at arm’s length, because she was very little and he was very tall, rather like – ’
‘Alexander!’ she shouted at him as he reached the other side. The lights changed and someone hooted behind her. ‘Alexander!’ She pulled her bicycle to the kerb and waited for him to come back to her.
He was not in uniform. ‘On leave?’ she said. ‘Well no. To tell the truth, Miss Joy, I’ve been discharged unfit.’
‘Oh, not your poor legs again?’
He nodded ruefully, and kicking one leg out before him, stared at it disgustedly.
‘How long have you been out? Why didn’t you come and see us?’
‘Well, I didn’t really like to, you know, Miss Joy. It seems so infra dig to be rejected, even from the Pioneer Corps – the dregs of the Army, the sweepings of the sty, we used to call our patchy lot. German Jews, conchies, Jap students, old crocks like me. One old gent had snow-white hair. Too sad it was to think of him with pick and shovel, but he turned out to be the best of the lot having just served five years’ hard labour. Now what about you, Miss Joy? Still at the factory? You don’t look as if it was agreeing with you, if I may remark on it.’
‘No wonder,’ said Joy. ‘I’m on night work.’
Alexander clicked his teeth. ‘That’s trying. I did it for five years once in Pittsburg. That was when I was a riveter. And Sir Rodney? He keeps up to form? Did he ever find any more Bath Olivers?’ He asked it so solemnly, that you might have thought he really cared.
‘Oh he’s all right,’ said Joy. ‘He’s going to Canada soon with his brother’s children, and that Rollo Reamer. D’you remember him, or is he since your day?’
‘I saw him once,’ said Alexander. ‘An unlikeable type, I remember. He smoked throughout my salmon chaud-froid. Canada eh? That’s wise. All these little beggars should be got out of it.’ He glanced down at the solemn little girl far below, who had circular blue eyes and a black Dutch bob, and waited holding his hand patiently, as if she were strap-hanging.
‘Are you going, too?’ Alexander asked.
‘No, I – ’ She could not keep up the chit-chat any longer. ‘Oh, Alexander, I’m in such trouble!’ she cried. ‘You must help me.’
‘But of course,’ he said, as he had always said when she wanted him to unravel string, or fob off a boring young man, or do up a dress at the back, or break it gently to Rodney that she had dropped one of his water-lily finger bowls.
‘We can’t talk here. Where can we go? I haven’t got long.’ She looked round nervously, as if she half expected to see the Tissots and Norman closing in on her. They went into a café, where two workmen were tearing at sausages like starving wolves, and a little old man tied together with string crouched in the corner over a cup of tea, into which he dipped pieces of bread from a newspaper.
Alexander asked for two teas and a lemonade. It came in a bottle with a straw sticking Up, and the sedate child wriggled a little forward on her seat and got down to it at once in a business-like way.
They smiled over the top of her head. ‘A relation of yours, or just a friend?’ Joy asked.
‘One of the family,’ he said. ‘She lives with my mother, where I’m staying at the moment.’
The child sucked on, making the bottle last, while Joy told her story. ‘And I don’t know what to do,’ she finished dismally. ‘I don’t know what to do.’
‘Do you want to go to this person?’
‘Of course not, but I feel I ought to, if she is my mother.’
‘Well, who’s to say she is? Granted, I never really credited you were a Cope. You see, I knew Sir Rodney’s sister; she could never have achieved a child like you. She hadn’t the. guts of a louse.’ He produced the Pioneer Corps expression fastidiously, as if he were holding a dead mouse up by the tail. ‘But if everyone else has believed it until now,’ he went on, ‘what’s to stop them?’
‘But I don’t believe it! Don’t you see, Alexander, that’s the awful thing. I do have my headaches on the right side, like she said. It often used to worry me, because I thought the damage must have spread from the left. I haven’t told her this, or Uncle Rodney or anyone. I’ve had an awful day, trying to decide whether to tell about it, or keep quiet. I prayed for you,’ she said with a half laugh. She had prayed, but had been brought up not to speak of such things.
‘Drink your tea, Miss Joy,’ said Alexander, ruminating.
‘It’s cold. I’m supposed to meet her to-night. I’ve been thinking all day, but I still don’t know what to do. If she’s my mother, I owe her something, surely? She’s ghastly, but probably pathetic inside, like most ghastly people. She needs me, I think. They got most of their money out of the Channel Islands and put it all into this hotel somewhere, and now she needs me to help her run it. If I am her daughter, I suppose I’ll have to.’
‘I don’t see why,’ said Alexander, to her surprise. She had expected him to take the ethical line. ‘She forfeited her rights by deserting you. Now, if I were Sir Rodney, or say, your real father–’
‘Oh God,’ cried Joy, flinging herself back in her chair, ‘I wish I had one.’
‘I wouldn’t let you go. She’s no claim, having once abandoned you.’
‘But she did come back – ’
‘After your money, no doubt, having heard with whom you’d taken up. You must watch out, Miss Joy.’
‘Oh, Alexander, you are a relief.’ Joy gave him a weary smile. ‘That was just what I wanted to hear. I’d better go now and send her packing, and to-morrow I’ll tell Uncle Roddie I’m not going to Canada. I’ll take a room somewhere. He’s been and let the flat without even asking me whether I wanted it. Isn’t it the limit?’ She got up.
‘Good luck,’ said Alexander. ‘I’m sure you’re doing the right thing.’
‘You’re always right. Why are you?’
‘I’ve only told you what I told myself, when it arose with me.’
‘What do you mean? When what arose?’
His face was creased as if the words were being wrung out of him. ‘You remember that girl I used to visit at Hounslow, that you and Sir Rodney were for ever teasing me about? Well,’ he nodded down at the child, sucking pop-eyed at the last gurgling drain of lemonade. ‘Here she is. My wife left me soon after she was born. We weren’t divorced, for what’s the point, since I won’t want to marry again, and she and her gentleman are quite happy to dispense with the solemnities. I’ve never spoken of this, for
a man is hurt by such things, you know, Miss Joy. Besides, any kind of marital unpleasantness might cost one’s place.
‘When Nancy, that was the wife, when Nancy thought she might be able to draw my Army allowance, she came back, but not for long when she saw how little it would be. When she saw’ – he nodded downwards – ‘oh, her mother-love was wakened then, all right, and she wanted to take the child away with her. I said no. Not ever, even for a while. The child owes her nothing. Anything she owes, she owes to me. She’s going to be mine!’
Joy stared at his shining face. ‘Who do I owe anything to?’ she asked. ‘Whose am I going to be?’
Alexander got up and suddenly became casual. He threw a few pennies on to the table in a vague way and snapped his fingers to the child, who climbed down and walked beside him to the door. ‘Try owing something to yourself, Miss Joy,’ he said as they crossed the pavement to where she had left her bicycle. ‘Be your own. Be yourself. You’ve far more chance of being happy than with all this shilly-shallying about. Jo, Joy, Kathleen – relax now, and be someone real.’
With this in mind, Joy rode hard for the Winchester Arms. She would be late for the factory now, but it did not matter. Be yourself, he had said, and by God, she would. She would fight Mrs Tissot tooth and nail. She’d fight Rodney if he tried to make her go to Canada. She’d be someone like Kitty Foyle, an independent working girl, with her own flat, and boy friends, and clever little suppers out of tins. That was about the only sort of life she had not yet tried. Archie? Oh, he could wait. Whenever he cropped up in her thoughts, he was always sent back to the end of the queue, to wait until she had the moral courage to decide about him.
In the Saloon Bar of the Winchester Arms, Joy looked round uncertainly.
‘Looking for someone, dear?’ asked the girl behind the bar. ‘I think you’ll find them in the Public. They was asking for a girl like you quite a time ago. Ooh, they been here quite a time.’
And they looked it. She had heard the noise faintly in the saloon bar; when she went through the other door, the room seemed full of her mother’s voice. Mrs Tissot was a little drunk. She was askew, happy, hail-fellow with everyone, swimmy-eyed, loose-lipped.
Mr Tissot was not drunk, but quietly and decently pickled. He sat with his stomach stuck out and his stained waistcoat unbuttoned, tapping his glass and swaying his head to some gentle, inaudible music. Norman was truculent, with his hair over his forehead and his battle blouse undone; brutish, sweating, like the time when Joy had seen him as a boxer.
‘Ay-yi Yippee!’ Mrs Tissot went off like a siren as she saw Joy come hesitatingly in through the cigarette haze. ‘I knew she’d come. That’s my darling!’ The people in the bar, who had suffered her for more than an hour, looked at her resignedly. One or two laughed at her, but a man playing darts said: ‘Cut it out, Ma. I can’t hear myself aim. Take her out of here,’ he said to Joy as she passed him. ‘You never heard such a shindy as the old bitch has been kicking up.’
Joy would not sit down. She would not take the drink which Norman brought her, so Mrs Tissot drank it quickly. ‘I’ve come to tell you it’s no good,’ said Joy bluntly. ‘I’m not your daughter.’
‘What, love?’ Mrs Tissot flopped forward over the table holding one side of her red thatched hair away from her ear.
Joy repeated herself louder, and Mrs Tissot screamed louder still. ‘Och!’ she cried. ‘I don’t give up like that. Who says you’re not my daughter?’ She looked round truculently. ‘I’ll fight them like a tigress for its young.’ She growled, bubbling saliva.
‘Well, I’m not your young,’ said Joy patiently. Would she ever be able to make her understand? ‘I never had a head pain on the right, only on the left. Here, here, here.’ She tapped the scar on her left temple.
‘Oh, fiddle,’ said Mrs Tissot blithely. ‘That’s foolish kind of talk. Forget it and sit down with us now and tell your old Ma what you mean by teasing her.’
‘I must go,’ Joy said. ‘I’m late for the factory already.’
‘You can’t face us,’ Norman said belligerently. ‘You know you’re lying because you don’t want to give up your muckin’ Mayfair Ufe. Ain’t that right?’
‘We’ll get her, Normie, we’ll get her. We’ll have her X-rayed,’ gloated Mrs Tissot like a Grand Guignol character planning to do some eye-gouging.
‘I’d like to see you try!’ flared Joy. ‘Can’t you understand? I’m Joy Stretton, Joy Stretton.’
Mrs Tissot shrieked with laughter. Norman bellowed. And Mr Tissot chose to let out an insect-hum of mi-mi-mi-mi-mi like a canary that must rival a noisy sewing-machine.
The darts player shouted to Joy: ‘Oh, for Christ’s sake, take ‘em away!’
Everyone was clamouring at Joy it seemed, surrounding her, stifling her with a babel in her ears that was like going under gas.
‘Shut up!’ she cried, and clapped a hand to the stab of pain that shot through the right side of her head.
‘Aha! Look at her!’ They pounced, Mrs Tissot yelled: ‘You’ve given yourself away now, my darling!’ And Joy went under in a slather of motherly love.
2
When she was sober, Mrs Tissot was really not so bad. She was warm-hearted and affectionate; suddenly outrageously generous, though just as outrageously mean at times. She was good-tempered, and even quite amusing company, if you were feeling strong enough. The trouble was, she hardly ever was completely sober, in or out of hours. The hotel into which the Tissots had put their savings turned out to be no more than a tiny public house shaped like a rabbit hutch in one of the by-lanes between Gray’s Inn Road and Guildford Street, with one or two bedrooms ‘for travellers’, although no one seemed to want to travel to those gloomy little attics.
Joy tried at first to keep them clean. She washed the lace curtains and kept the beds made up, but she soon grew disheartened and left them to the mice and cobwebs, and when a man did once come seeking a lodging, he turned away repelled. Mrs Tissot did not mind a bit of dirt, although the taproom had to be kept clean in case the Inspector came. This was Joy’s job, and if she wanted to sweep and dust their living quarters too – well, Mrs Tissot let her indulge this whim, although she turned up her collar and grumbled if Joy opened too many windows.
She had to let herself be called Kathleen, although she still thought of herself as Joy. She felt that she was leading a dual existence, acting a part she did not feel. She had to remind herself all the time that this was her mother and this now to be her life, for her heart could not get used to the idea. She saw why her mother needed her, for after about eight in the evening, especially if there were doodle-bugs about, Mrs Tissot was incapable of serving in the bar.
Mr Tissot would not come into the taproom. He was the backroom boy of the business and did the ordering and accounts quite creditably. He spent most of his time in the stuffy kitchen-parlour at the back of the house, sipping neat whisky and smoking French cigarettes, which looked damp because the paper was yellow. At set times, he would put on a dusty beret, change his slippers for ochre boots and go for a bent-kneed walk in the purlieus of Bloomsbury, returning with a knob of garlic or a bundle of spaghetti, or a plaited poppy-seed loaf. He seldom spoke to Joy. He watched her a lot, with a half smile, and he would sometimes give her hand a comforting little pat, as if he were sorry for her.
He was no trouble to anyone, and Joy began to grow almost fond of him, as one might of an accommodating piece of furniture. His chief fault was that he was so messy. Even a napkin tucked under his goatee at mealtimes did not keep his clothes clean. He usually had a filthy torn handkerchief lolloping out of his pocket, and his nails were uncut and grimy. The only neat thing about him was his little beard. He trimmed it each day with nail scissors, which he left lying clotted with grey bristles on the draining board of the scullery sink – for Joy had guessed right; of course there was no bathroom.
Between him and his wife there existed that compensating harmony often seen in the union of the subdued and the exubera
nt. It was not so much that she drained his vitality as that she had enough vitality for both of them. They left each other alone and made no attempt to share any tastes or habits. Her boisterousness did not get on his nerves; he let it play round him like the winds of heaven, and she did not try to stimulate or goad him. If he barely spoke for days on end she did not mind for no day was long enough for her to get through all the talking she had to do herself.
When sober, she looked after him quite well and fed him like a prince, for cooking was the only thing at which she was clever. She was very stupid, Joy soon discovered, and almost completely uneducated. Apart from all the clichés in the world and a few oddments of knowledge that the drift of her life had settled on her, she did not know anything and she did not want to know. She scoffed at the books which Joy had brought from the flat as an agnostic who has never been inside a church might scoff at church-going.
She was a voluminous Roman Catholic, however, hung the house with garish holy pictures and herself with holy medals and dangled a great rosary like a ball and chain down the backs of people’s necks at Mass, while she gabbled her prayers ostentatiously. She took Joy to see the local priest and embarrassed her very much giving a highly-coloured and invented explanation of why her daughter had not yet been instructed in the Faith. She also embarrassed the priest, who was blunt and boyish, by dashing at him whenever she saw him in the street with a howl of ‘God bless you, Father! Pray for me!’ To which he replied nervously: ‘Oh righto.’
If Mrs Tissot were her mother, Joy thought that she must take after her father. She often wondered about him. Sometimes she made up stories of how he was someone rich or famous or powerful, who came and claimed her and took her away, having as much right to her as Mrs Tissot. But when Joy begged to know who her father had been, her mother hedged, and gave a different joking answer each time. He was someone so celebrated that it would be a scandal of all time if it ever came out. He was a rollicking sailor. He was a soldier, on his way to death in the trenches. ‘And you couldn’t blame a girl, Kath, for it was the war after all, and one had to do what one could.’
Joy and Josephine Page 40