The Girl Now Leaving

by The Girl Now Leaving (retail) (epub)

  Before Lu could add anything, Nellie took over. ‘Thank you for seeing us, Mr Ezzard. Will you put a notice up to that effect?’

  ‘All right, why not? I’ll get George to see to it.’

  As the three were leaving, he did his usual trick of making a parting shot. ‘I would have said that you were perhaps three of “Queenform’s” most reliable employees, not at all the hot-heads who want to upset the status quo with unions and conditions of work. I shouldn’t like to lose you.’

  Lu could have spoken for herself, but not for the two older women.

  Outside there was a great deal of jeering up at the office windows. Some stones were thrown, only one of which reached the offices; the others went through the barred windows of the ground-floor machine room where Nellie and Lu worked.

  * * *

  As she had promised, on the first Sunday in September, Lu rang the number David had given her. A woman with a London accent answered, Lu asked if David Hatton was there.

  ‘I’m sorry, no.’

  ‘He was expecting me to call.’

  ‘Was he? May I ask who is calling?’

  There was a beat of pause before she answered. ‘He won’t know me except as Louise… he was expecting me to call.’

  ‘I see. Could you hold on for a moment, please?’

  Lu heard her saying something with her hand held over the mouthpiece, then it cleared. ‘Lady Margaret will speak with you.’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘Lady Gore-Hatton, Mr Hatton’s grandmother.’

  ‘Hello.’ The voice was loud, the manner imperious and tetchy. ‘Who is that?’

  In Lu’s terms the voice was top-drawer, cut-glass, posh, and associated with arrogant authority. Her instinct was to put down the receiver but she managed to stammer out, ‘Can I speak to David, please?’

  ‘No, I am afraid that you may not.’

  ‘Well… ah …’ She slammed the earpiece into its clip and left the call-box blushing and confused, then went into one of the many little cafes in the Lampeter area that opened despite it being Sunday. There she sat and drank tea until she had got over the shock of that voice, that title. He had said, hadn’t he? ‘My grandmother is called Vera.’ Not with an accent like that, she wasn’t. Lu felt extremely foolish and naive. Lascelles gown or not, he had probably seen right through her. Embarrassment at her silly deception was replaced by indignation at his more serious one of not being there on the day she had arranged to telephone him. She left the cafe feeling quite justified at having crashed the earpiece into the holder.

  * * *

  Miss Lake wanted to hear from Lu about the delegation. ‘Mr Ezzard’s a hard and proud man, Lu; he’s not going to forgive three women trying to tell him what he should do.’

  ‘He can do what he likes. It’s time I left there. If I just knew what to do, I would be gone in a flash.’

  ‘Well, I’d appreciate it if you didn’t fly off for the moment. Did you know that Eileen Grigg’s brother is home on leave?’

  Lu’s heart sank. Not now! She had quite enough on her plate just now, thank you very much. She felt irritable and put upon. She wanted to say, What’s it got to do with me?

  She would stay, of course. If Lena wasn’t exactly a friend in the same way that Bar and Katie were, she and Lu were part of one another’s lives, and if Lena had taken some things for granted, it had been Lu herself who had been the intruder into Lena’s world which, until Lu had persuaded her to go to the pictures, had been self-contained.

  ‘OK, I will. Is he much of a threat to her these days?’

  ‘Lena still thinks so.’

  ‘Yeah, well, it’d be a pity if she went back into her shell again.’ It was a habit of Lu’s when she was irritated with Miss Lake to revert to her old street-talk.

  ‘Don’t expect too much of her, Lu.’

  ‘I don’t expect nothing of her.’ Which wasn’t true, and Lu knew it; she still thought that somewhere inside the phlegmatic woman was the old Lena.

  * * *

  When Lu went round to Lena’s room the door was bolted and the key turned in the lock. It wasn’t opened until Lena was assured that Lu was alone. The normally spartan and tidy place was in a mess; Lena was sitting in bed, dressed, flicking through a pile of old magazines and drinking from a large bottle of cherry-red fizz. Her dull, toneless voice had returned. ‘He’s come back, Lu.’

  ‘I know. He’s not likely to come here, is he? He’ll be off round the pubs with his friends.’

  ‘He’s worst when he’s had a skinful. He’d think it was funny to bring them all round here.’

  ‘Do you want to come round with us until he goes back?’

  ‘No. I’m safer here. This is the top floor. He’d have to take a chopper to get through that door. If he did…’ From within the pile of assorted blankets she produced the type of thin, pointed knife used to bone out ham.

  ‘Eileen! That won’t do any good. Come and stop with us.’

  ‘My ways are queer, Lu. I wouldn’t fit in. It’s why I like my own place.’ Her own place was pathetic, but Lu supposed that after life with the Griggs and then time spent in various hostels, a little attic room with a key to its door was better. ‘When the factory starts again, you could walk home with me. Specially if we got to work extra shifts.’

  * * *

  The last of the summer visitors to the seaside had gone home. Palccino’s Ice Parlour turned to its winter role providing ‘Bacon Breakfasts and Hot Snacks All Day’ to workers and shoppers in the centre of town. Bar’s tips became less, but during the summer she had accumulated a tidy sum of money in a tin box.

  Ken and his friends continued walking and working, sometimes stopping for weeks at a time in the same area, helping with the harvesting of olives, oranges, tomatoes and garlic bulbs. Sometimes, where a small bit of land was cropped by a family and could not stand the cost of extra labour, they would work for their food and a place to sleep. ‘You’d not recognize me now, Lu. I’ve got big and broad and brawny and brown (which goes down a treat with the girls).’ It was the day he mentioned Guadalajara in one of his letters that Lu truly began to feel resentful. It was one of the places she had claimed for herself, for her future away from Pompey. Guadalajara was one of the places that had hummed a siren song which had reached her ears in a classroom in the slum streets of Portsmouth. She grew even more envious of Ken’s carefree existence.

  Ray too began to have moody silences. He seemed happy enough at times, especially when the three of them had been to a show in town, or when Lu had gone dancing in Southampton, and he and Bar had gone to the cinema, but many times he would sit after his meal staring at the newspaper but not reading it. Whatever it was that was going on in his mind clearly troubled him.

  On the machine floor at the ‘Queenform’ factory, the windowpanes broken during the lock-out demonstration stayed broken. George said that they had a choice: give him the name of who did it, or have money docked to pay for the repairs. Nobody wanted to or could say, and nobody could afford to have money docked, so that those girls who were affected most by the draught wrapped themselves up in something extra where the cold hit most.

  One evening after she had seen Lena safely locked up for the night, Lu returned home to be shocked at the sight of a gleaming car parked outside Number 110. David! Her stomach turned over. It was a new car, but a similar model. How could he possibly have tracked her down? It was Bar’s half day, so the light was on in the house and the curtains drawn; she must have invited him into the house. Lu didn’t know what to do, except to go back to Lena’s and wait there till he had gone. Wrapping her scarf round her head so that it partly covered her face, she turned and, head down, walked quickly in the direction from which she had just come.

  When she reached the bread shop she caught a glimpse of Bar’s black hair with its red ribbons, so she stepped out into the road away from the light. As she did so, someone she hadn’t noticed waiting on the corner grabbed her elbow and pulled her back on to the
pavement, holding her tightly and pinioning her arms. Duke Barney!

  ‘You’ll get yourself killed bucking away like that.’ She had not heard that half-mocking, half-insolent tone for months. He was smartly but unconventionally dressed in a roll-necked jumper and narrow trousers; she had seen such costume at the pictures on wealthy Brazilian cattle-ranchers. He still wore his hair tied in a club; pulled back from his face it emphasized his racial features. ‘I said I’d call round, didn’t I? Come on, I’ve come to take you up to see the Fire Boys Fair.’

  Later, when she tried to recall that evening, she couldn’t remember much about what they had said to one another on that drive. Perhaps they had said nothing.

  She got into his car, just as she was, wearing her work clothes, and they drove off to Heathfield, a small village twenty miles away. Surprisingly, he was a steady, slow driver, perhaps from years of travelling by the one horse-power of little mares like Pixie. The car smelt of new leather, and its engine performed perfectly. For Duke it would have to be a car to impress. Even when he had been a youth, he had never galloped any horse as Bar would do, but preferred to sit erect, composing himself into a noble image. She had seen him do it. It was the same with his driving; straight-backed, head erect, looking at the road ahead down his long nose. He didn’t mention the car, or how he came to be so prosperous. He didn’t need to, it would be sufficient for Duke to be seen as such. Lu did not want to know.

  Although he behaved with authority, Lu sensed that he was not entirely at ease. She wondered whether what he required was for her to see that he had succeeded, that it should be herself in particular – having known him as a half-breed village boy gypsy – who should see that he had made Duke Barney into a man of substance. He had come to show off to her, much as he had that day in Swallitt Wood when he had dived into the pool.

  He was certainly a very attractive man, but with something about him that was unknowable; he had that same mystical spirit that was part of Bar’s enigma. There was part of them that was difficult to understand. Perhaps they had been born with extra senses. Lu had felt that about Bar, and about her mother, Ann Carter, which was strange because you would have thought it would have come to them from their gypsy side. Duke’s unknowability was quite different from not knowing David Hatton. Her ignorance of David was because she had made the choice not to continue to see him. It wouldn’t be difficult to discover David if she chose. It would be a challenge to know what made Duke Barney tick.

  She would never take up that challenge, for she felt that the more one knew about a person, the more one became bound to them. To love was worse, love dragged like an anchor on people’s lives. She had seen it everywhere. If Ray had not loved her and Ken and their mother he could have done as he pleased, as Ken had. Girls at work who had always been one of the bunch, free to do what they liked in their own time and with their own pocket money, free to dress as they pleased, wear their hair as they pleased, fell in love with the idea of falling in love and changed. They gave up everything that had made them who they were to become attached to their young man. Not only attached, they became part of him, his life became theirs and in a matter of months the carefree girl became weighted down by all the rules and traditions that went with falling in love.

  But that did not mean that she wasn’t enjoying being here with Duke. Indeed not, she was elated.

  After he had parked, they went along with the thronging crowds making their way through the narrow streets. As they passed street-hawkers, he bought bunches of balloons and flags on sticks and insisted that she carry them. He put coins into every collecting box. Taking her by the hand, he pushed a way through the crowds. He said hardly anything, but from time to time looked back at her with an amused expression. She felt that he might be daring her to protest, or pushing her to see whether she would show some curiosity. But she did not; she felt elated by the surprise and excitement at the dramatic change of scene. One minute she had been in dimly lit Lampeter Street, and almost the next she was part of a thronging crowd, marching bands, fife and drum troupes, tableaux, floats, decorated wagons and lorries, little girls dressed as fairies and princesses and little boys as Zulus and fire chiefs, all lit by flaring torches.

  ‘You ever been to the Fire Boys before?’

  ‘No, I thought it was just a carnival with fireworks.’

  He nodded. ‘Come on, the bonfire’s down yonder meadow. I never miss the Fire Boys.’ She followed where he led, wondering as she went how had he travelled to this place on other occasions. Riding one of his horses bareback to sell or exchange with other horse traders perhaps? In a van like some of the travellers? She guessed that he wouldn’t have been so keen for her to have seen him then.

  He had said earlier on, ‘I was waiting for Bar when she came out of work.’ How had he known where to find her? Perhaps he had been back to Wickham first to display his prosperity there. Bar wouldn’t have withheld her praise or curiosity as Lu had done. Then he’d said, ‘She’s found her right place. She belongs where she is. She’s happy all right, and she wants that brother of yours, don’t she? She wants to be married like house-living people.’

  She wondered whether he would offer an opinion to Bar about herself. How did he see her? There were ways in which she and Duke were two of a kind. He would be wary of any display of emotion that would give another person a hold upon him, he too must think that he was separate, different and, she guessed, he recognized that in herself. What an admission. Wasn’t it Tess Durbeyfield who, although she thought herself less worthy of Angel Clare, knew herself to be more impassioned, cleverer and more beautiful than the worthier women? Not that Lu had any such humble thoughts of her own worth. Had she been here with David Hatton, his amiable conversation would have cut into her thoughts, but uncommunicative Duke left her thoughts to ramble on. Quite risky thoughts too.

  In the field a bonfire was alight at one end of a roped-off lane, lined several rows deep with people whose faces were lit sporadically by coloured flares and silvery showers of fireworks’ sparkles. Standing at the end furthest from the bonfire, he confidently put an arm about her. How natural and friendly that seemed.

  From the moment when they had set eyes on one another in Lampeter Street, mutual physical desire had flickered about them like an unseen St Elmo’s Fire. Her own eager libido was distracting. He did not make any other movement, yet she had a strong sensation that her whole body was enveloped by him. Taking his free hand she drew it into her coat and held it against her midriff, where there was bare flesh at a gap between skirt and top. He flexed his fingers upwards and found her breast. That contact effected a circuit.

  They did not look at one another, but stood in total awareness of each other’s presence within the dense, noisy crowd which was illuminated redly by the raging bonfire. The stillest and most silent stimulation.

  Suddenly he drew away, ranted off his hacking jacket, thrust it at her and dived into the crowd. When he reappeared, he was inside the roped-off lane with a group of men who were preparing to be Fire Boys by wrapping themselves in sacking aprons.

  The climax of the Fire Boys Fair was a much-tempered twentieth-century version of what in the far distant past was possibly a rite of passage. Lu had, during one of her visits to Roman’s Fields, found a book about such rituals in Gabriel Strawbridge’s shelves. A man must prove himself fit for coupling – wasn’t that how it had been put? Bundles of straw, resin-smeared and bound into rolls, were set alight; young men carried these bare-handed, tossing them into a fire as an offering to a winter god. Lu felt almost breathless with anticipation. It was not difficult to make the connection between the crackling, burning symbols and male potency. Had Duke intended her to make another connection between this ritual and the one she and Bar had performed at Swallitt Pool? Water and Fire. This time it was she who was hidden but looking on. He must be aware of it, she was certain.

  He ran, knowing how to control the dangerous burden. He was not intent on out-running other men, many of whom were
pie-eyed from day-long drinking. Lu supposed that it was enough for him that he was part of the ancient masculine rite, and that she was there to see it. Having tossed his fiery offering into the heart of the fire, he returned to her, put on his jacket, and guided her out of the field.

  By the feel of its bark she knew that this was an oak tree against which her back was pressed. Its solid trunk buttressed her against the pressure of Duke’s strong, lean body, making a trio of them. This was no suddenly awakened desire as it had been with David Hatton; this mysterious lust had been burning underground since the day when he had walked out on to the bent willow and dived into Swallitt Pool.

  No preliminaries, except the swift, practised rolling of rubber. Body to body standing in the chilly woodland. ‘It’s what you wanted, and now you’ve got it.’

  ‘And I wanted this. Red hair, main thick. I watched you spinning round with Bar. Red hair, red hair, red hair everywhere. I was cross-threaded to see that.’

  That day, ages ago… years ago. She hadn’t seen him watching, but she’d known that he was. She’d felt his presence, hadn’t wanted to cover herself – that would have been too childish.

  ‘You watched me, too. This is what you saw and you wanted it ever since.’

  Not in the way he thought she had; her desire for him had been buried under newer desires, of which many were nothing to do with wanting Duke Barney to be her lover.

  ‘That Christmas, when I had supper at Roman’s, you’d a come with me if I’d a said half a word. We was both cross-threaded that time. You thought to see Eli Barney’s rag-ass youth, but I had grown to a man, and I didn’t look like no man you had ever seen. I know that… I know what I look like. Nobody ever forgets meeting Duke Barney, do they, Lu?’ He was mocking her with his voice, ‘Nor will you forget tonight, I’ll see to it you don’t,’ teasing her with his hands. ‘That Christmas, I thought you would have got yourself into a snooty college girl, but you was a woman working for her own keep. I could have had you then; you couldn’t take your eyes off me. I licked my lips a purpose to see what you’d do and you damned near come there and then. If I’d have sucked your finger when you touched my mouth you would have, you was that hot for me. Like now.’