Joy and Josephine

by Monica Dickens

  ‘No, no,’ he said when she tried to thank him. ‘Please. Never mind.’ He patted her hand.

  Sometimes, Joy could not go to the factory because Mrs Tissot would not get up and cook the breakfast. Later, she would deck herself in a grimy satin blouse and go off with Chum instead of serving in the bar at lunch time. Joy was reprimanded by the works manager and had to wriggle out of it by saying she had family trouble at home.

  Trouble at home? There certainly was, but she struggled on. She had let herself in for this. She must go through with it. For ever? Who knew? Some day, she supposed she would get used to being Kathleen Tissot, Mrs Tissot’s daughter. What was that song they used to sing years ago in the Lane, hopping over the cracks?

  ‘Kathleen, Kathleen everywhere

  Kathleen over the water.

  Kathleen, Kathleen, I declare,

  Mrs Tissot’s daughter.’

  In her unhappy time at The Lamb, she often thought back to her childhood and the Portobello Road, although she never went there nowadays. It was out of her way now that she did not bicycle to work. She did not want to see Mrs Abinger. She was cross with her for all the complications she had caused by dithering and swithering about who she really was. Had she known all the time she was not really Joy Stretton? She had pretended once that she was positive. Why couldn’t she have stuck to that instead of betraying her to Bridget Tissot? The question of the head injury would never have arisen. Oh, the lies that Abinger woman had told in her time, the trouble she had caused 1

  That summer, Mrs Tissot became ill and Joy had to stay away from work to look after her. She had to bear the brunt of Chum alone, and he had the effrontery, with her mother in bed upstairs, to leap on Joy in the parlour. She had the very great pleasure of slapping his face, which is à thing every girl would like to do to one man just once in her life. It felt like walloping raw steak.

  When the doctor said she could get up, Mrs Tissot, who was a lazy woman for all her exuberance, claimed to have a relapse, and made Joy wait on her still longer. Her bed grew more foul. Joy would not make it up for her any more, since there was nothing wrong with her, but she would not do it herself. The sheets were stained and reeking; it was full of torn newspapers and old cigarette butts and bits of biscuits, and the cat lived in the tunnel down at the bottom.

  I’m going back to work,’ Joy said. ‘You’re all right now. You’ll have to be. There’s a war on.’

  ‘Do you tell me! Will you listen to that now?’ as a doodlebug passed overhead so low that you could hear the rattle of every nut and bolt. Mrs Tissot went under the bedclothes.

  ‘This is a hell of a life,’ she said, when she emerged in her old black cardigan and searched for her cigarettes somewhere loose in the bed. She had a nasty habit of sending Mr Tissot out with only enough to buy five at a time in little screws of paper. ‘I think we’ll evacumulate ourselves.’

  ‘Not me,’ said Joy. ‘I’ll stay at the factory.’

  ‘That’s what you think. You’ll come with your Ma. Perhaps we’ll go back to Wicklow, back to my birthplace, and see your old grandma. She’s eighty, and you ought to see her cottage. How those people live! A mud floor and chickens larking on and off the table. Still, better there than here. Whoops!’ She went under the bedclothes again.

  It was the end of everything if Joy had got to go to Ireland now and live in a pigsty, where Mrs Tissot would rapidly, happily, become as dirty as the pigs. Perhaps Joy and Mr Tissot might run away. Would he want to? He still seemed quite content, but you never knew what he was thinking. If only he would talk. It was terrible to have nobody to talk to.

  3

  She was coming home one night in the Tube, which was so crowded that there was not even a sixth share of a strap to hang on to. At every station, more and more people pressed in, the last one barely shoehorned inside the closing doors, until it seemed that the carriage must soon bulge like a fermenting tin of fruit.

  Joy was so wedged in that she could only just turn her head to see who was saying: ‘Hullo, Jo!’ behind her. No one except Norman had called her that for years, and this was certainly not Norman’s voice.

  It was Wilfred Moore in naval uniform, as tall and thin as his father, looking down at her over people’s heads with a serious, sensible, ugly face, that was saved from ugliness by the big black velvet eyes he had kept from his childhood. In the jammed carriage, they could not get close enough to speak to each other, and when the train stopped at Leicester Square, Wilfred jerked his head towards the door and called: ‘Come on out and talk, if you’re not in a hurry.’

  Joy was suppose to be hurrying back to open the bar, but she got out and went with Wilfred to an underground bar where her factory clothes did not matter.

  She made him talk about his family. She did not want to talk about herself, because she did not know how much he knew. If, as far as he was concerned, she was still Joy Stretton, there was no need for him to know of her downfall. She would probably never see him again.

  They talked about their childhood. Do you remember, do you remember? absorbed in the past, forgetting their drinks, more aware of the hut on Wormwood Scrubs than of the shored up, smoky cellar where they sat.

  ‘I always liked you,’ Wilfred said, ‘an awful lot, Jo.’

  ‘So did I you, Wilf, most awfully.’ She realized this now, although at the time he had always been outshone for her by Billy. Presently, in an off-hand way, she asked about Billy. He must have been married now for quite a time, she supposed. Had he any children?’

  ‘Children?’ said Wilf. ‘Good Lord, he’s not married. Oh, you mean Lisa, I suppose. It seems so long ago I’d almost forgotten. They were talking of getting married at one time, but then the war broke out and he didn’t get home for it after all, and the thing sort of disintegrated. Eventually I suppose the poor girl got sick of waiting, and I don’t blame her. She’s married some kind of a solid Major now, I believe. Much better for her than Bill. An irresponsible type, my brother.’

  ‘Perhaps,’ said Joy, ‘but he’s rather nice.’

  ‘Oh, he’s nice all right. He wrote a long letter about seeing you in Malta – long for him, that is. We’d heard about you suddenly becoming one of the upper ten. What an amazing, fairy-tale story, Jo, a complete Cinderella act. We were proud to think we’d known you in your Porto days, and then Bill wrote what an absolute knock-out you were. Still are, if it comes to that.’

  ‘You don’t have to say that,’ Joy said. ‘I look terrible now, and I know it. I’m not the girl I was.’

  ‘You’re all right. I say, I wish you’d write to me sometimes, will you? I’ve got to join my ship to-morrow, but let’s meet on my next leave. Do let’s, Jo.’

  ‘Yes, of course. I think I ought to go now, Wilf. I’ve got a lot to do at home. No, don’t bother to come with me. I can get a train to Russell Square,’ she said without thinking.

  ‘Russell Square? I thought you lived in Mount Street or somewhere.’

  ‘I did,’ said Joy blankly, ‘but not now. I might as well tell you. You’ll laugh, but it turned out not to be a Cinderella story, quite the other way about in fact. I’m not Joy Stretton. That was all a mistake. My real mother turned up, and I’m with her now.’

  ‘Well!’ said Wilfred, not knowing what to say. ‘It must be nice for you to have a real mother.’

  ‘It isn’t,’ said Joy bitterly. ‘I wish she’d never come. I wish I’d never found out who I was. Oh, Wilf – ’ she turned to him suddenly and clutched his arm, ‘it’s awful. We keep a pub, a beastly little one. She’s got an awful boy friend who’s always there. She’s always drunk. Don’t tell a soul. Promise. It’s not even as if I feel like her daughter. I don’t like her. She’s dirty. I only hope I take after my father, but she won’t even tell me who he was.’

  ‘He must have been pretty nice,’ said Wilfred slowly.

  ‘Perhaps he was; I wish I knew. I wish I knew what kind of a girl I am. I’ve been mixed up with so many different people, but you are what
you’re born, always, aren’t you? Or do you think your surroundings make you what you are?’

  ‘A bit of each, I think,’ he said gravely. ‘What you’re born determines what you are at the very centre of yourself, but so deep down that it might not ever come to the surface of your character at all if different influences had swamped it. Say, for instance, you were born to two completely vicious, brutish parents. If you were taken away and brought up from the word go by – well, let’s say the Royal Family for the sake of argument, you wouldn’t grow up much different from Princess Elizabeth. You’d even feel like her. But – and this is where the Blood Will Out part comes in – although your upbringing may have directed, or disguised the original core of your character, it won’t have changed it. In some crisis, something you reacted to with instinct not reason, like terror, or passion, or physical agony, you might easily revert to type and ravage Buckingham Palace.’

  ‘You mean,’ asked Joy, ‘Outside things don’t ever alter or destroy the real you?’

  ‘Yes. Tortured prisoners-of-war have found that out – if they kept their reason. What you were when you were an egg, you are till you die, only it may never come to the surface if too many layers of influence go over it.’

  ‘But look, if you can be influenced, you ought to fit in where-ever you’re brought up. In my different homes, I’ve always sooner or later had an unsettled feeling of not belonging.’

  ‘Well, of course,’ said Wilfred. ‘Everyone gets that, even in the family they were born to. Look at us. We’re a pretty contented family but we all went through the stage of not knowing what we wanted.’

  ‘Good Lord,’ said Joy. ‘I never knew that. Your sureness was one of the things I envied most about you.’

  ‘Oh no, we had the most awful time, with Tess wanting to go as a Missionary to Central Africa; and Billy saying the house was the wrong side of the Park, and picking quarrels about the Navy with my Pa; and I was always wanting to go and starve on my own in a furnished room in Maida Vale. Then, of course, the minute you have to leave home, you long to come back. It isn’t only you who feels unsettled, Jo. No one ever properly settles down until it’s in a home they’ve made for themselves. It’s like giving a dog a basket, and he’ll go and scratch out a corner for himself in the coalshed. I’d like to get married, only I’ve never yet met anyone, except – I say, Jo dear – ’

  Oh no, Wilf,’ Joy said in a flurry. Marry Billy’s brother? That would be too ironical.

  ‘All right,’ he said, ‘I gather you’re trying to save my face by stopping me saying it. It’s all right, Jo. I didn’t think you would, even to get away from The Lamb. Must you stay there? I wish you wouldn’t. You don’t look a bit well.’

  ‘That means I look plain.’

  ‘Be sensible. I’m talking as a doctor. I can see all the evidence of mental and physical strain, with the possibility of a complete breakdown.’

  ‘Sounds just about like what I feel,’ said Joy. ‘Wilf, when you’re being professional, you get that solemn look you used to get when you were carpentering. You had a special voice for talking about it too, a kind of bluff, clipped voice, like Billy when he had that football craze. You’ve got a special doctor’s voice now.’

  ‘Well, as a doctor, I’m telling you, you ought to get away.’

  ‘I can’t. She’s my mother. I’ll have to stick to her.’

  ‘Are you sure she is? You seem to have been wrong lots of other times about who you were.’

  ‘Oh yes.’ She told him about the headache and how she had given herself away. ‘I knew at once, when she said she’d dropped her baby on the right side of its head. I’d often wondered why I got the pain on the opposite side to where the picture fell.’

  ‘But good Lord, woman,’ Wilfred suddenly pounded the little table, making their glasses bounce, ‘haven’t you ever heard of referred pain? It doesn’t prove a thing.’ Joy stared. ‘Your nerves don’t run on tram-lines,’ he said, resuming his rather sententious medical voice. ‘They’re networks, branching off all over the place. So you often get a message of pain from a place where the injury isn’t, but a branch of the nerve from the injury is. That’s why you get the first appendicitis pain in the middle, and often a spinal pain in your turn.’

  Joy swallowed and thought hard, taking this in. ‘You mean,’ she said, ‘my headache doesn’t prove I’m Kathleen Tissot – God, what a detestable name! I’ve always hated it.’ She suddenly caught sight of his watch. ‘Golly, look at the time! The bar should have been opened hours ago. She’ll be livid.’ Then a beaming smile broke over her face like a sunlit wave. ‘But what do I care? It’s none of my business any more. They’ll be all right. They’ll go to the South of Ireland and eat ham. Old Daddy Tissot, he won’t mind. He’s happy anywhere as long as he’s left in peace and quiet.’

  ‘Fat chance of that in Southern Ireland,’ Wilfred said, as they got up.

  When they parted outside the station, he said: ‘You will write, won’t you? We pick up letters pretty often, even when we are at sea.’

  ‘Of course. Oh, Wilf, do take care of yourself.’ He was just the sort of person who got killed in a war. She had a dreadful feeling about him.

  ‘You bet,’ he said. ‘See you on my next leave. Get away from that woman as soon as you can and let me know where you are. Where will you go, anyway?’

  Where would she go? It depends who I am, she thought, but she did not know who she was. Who would have her? Norman would, but she was not going near him again. Not Archie; that was all over, and anyway, she was still a Roman Catholic. She would have gone to Alexander, but he had chosen to go and look after Rodney in Canada, for the sake of getting his child out there.

  ‘Where will you go?’ repeated Wilfred, leaning forward to peer at her in the blackness of Charing Cross Road.

  He dimly saw her. ‘To my Mum, of course.’

  ‘But I thought you were leaving the pub – ’

  ‘I am. I mean my Mum. My Mum Abinger, in the Lane.’

  The siren was wailing as Jo lugged two heavy cases down the pitch-dark Portobello Road. She found Mrs Abinger preparing to spend the night blanketed in her armchair, for she never went to bed, she said, when there were coogle bombs about.

  ‘Where arc the others?’ Jo asked. ‘You don’t mean they go to Ellison’s shelter and leave you up here alone? Come on, I’ll take you down.’

  ‘No, no, my dear. I’d rather stay here. I’m such an awkward body to get up and down steps. You go on home, there’s a good girl, before it gets too bad.’

  ‘I am home,’ said Jo, slinging off her hat, ‘for good.’

  So they were together when the doodlebug hit the back of Ellison’s and the Corner Stores rocked like a mad thing and survived. It was morning before the policeman came up with something for them to identify.

  Mrs Abinger, still stupefied, sat looking for a long time at the large Homburg hat and the baby-blue crochet scarf. ‘Poor George,’ she said at last, ‘he always said the Corner Stores would stand long after Ellison’s had crumbled. I hope he knows, wherever he is. He’d be so pleased to think that he was right.’

  She had to be got out of London. She remembered Bolt Bay, and Jo went down there and found a furnished cottage on the harbour.

  ‘It’s my Mum,’ she pleaded to the Works Manager, and cried a little in his office.

  He let her go. ‘But they’ll be after you,’ he said. ‘The Ministry of Labour won’t care about your Mum.’

  She planned to find war work in Devonshire. Mrs Abinger, installed as snug as a cat in the tiny cobbled cottage with oil lamps, a pump for the water and an open range for cooking, was perfectly happy pottering about all day like a pensioner in an almshouse. She had no stairs to climb and when it was fine, she took to gardening, with long-handled tools so that she did not have to stoop. She put potted plants along all the window-sills and kept a kettle always just off the boil at the back of the range. As she stood at her doorway in the evening sun, watching for Jo with her
hands folded under a clean flowered apron, she looked just like an illustration from Beatrix Potter.

  Jo went every day to help in the Service hospital along the cliff. It was a group of huts with no proper garden, but some seats had been put in a corner of the enclosure that overlooked the sea, and it was there that the convalescents and walking patients idled and fretted away the sunny afternoons. Jo went out one evening to call a patient in for treatment and found him talking to a boy in a white submarine jersey. She knew who it was from the back of his head long before she reached the beach.

  Billy had two legs wounds and had nearly lost his foot. He would be here for several weeks yet. They could see each other every day and he would be allowed to come out to the cottage for supper as often as he liked.

  That evening, instead of going straight home, she climbed the steep lane, crossed the road, and went through the churchyard to St Joseph’s. She stopped in the porch as she always did, wondering if she had ever lain swaddled there. Joy or Josephine? She would probably never know, but it didn’t seem to matter. She was herself. And Billy was coming to supper to-morrow.

  This electronic edition published in 2011 by Bloomsbury Reader

  Bloomsbury Reader is a division of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc, 50 Bedford Square, London WC1B 3DP

  Copyright © 1948 by Monica Dickens

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