by Maeve Binchy
“I don’t trust him,” she had said once. “He’s one of the takers. I should know, I used to be one. He’ll take all you can give, and then one day he’ll decide you are nagging, or not enough fun, or not sexy enough, and he’ll go and take from someone else.”
Sophie had just laughed. “Nothing worse than a reformed drunk for telling you the evils of having a glass of sherry.”
Peggy simply shrugged. “Don’t say I didn’t warn you,” she said, and went back to her leather cutting. She worked now about ten hours a day. Whenever Sophie called, she was either bent over minute pieces of leather or she was out. Looking for pieces from her various outlets, she said, or having a walk to clear her head. Sophie was amazed that she could change life-styles so simply but Peggy said that she mustn’t be naive. Occasionally she visited Mr. Shipton in the afternoons, he had a couch in his office, and Mr. Shipton was very nice about giving Peggy pieces of leather and suede from his factory, so Peggy was very nice to him from time to time on his office couch.
Sophie found that sad and a bit disgusting, but Peggy said rubbish, it was glorious compared to picking people up in the streets, and how else could she afford all the material, so Sophie tried to put it out of her mind.
But today her mind was troubled as she sat and smiled at the tourists and made the odd sale. She felt very restless and anxious for something to change. It wasn’t just the heat and the headache, it was as if she had been getting ready for this feeling. Systematically she ticked off all the good things about the way she lived. She had Eddie, beautiful tender Eddie, with his big dark eyes that made her feel weak just thinking about them, like girls were meant to go weak at the knees over pop stars. Eddie was so moody and marvellous that you never knew what to expect when you got home in the evenings. But that’s what made the evenings when he had bought her a huge bunch of lilac, and was waiting in his black dressing gown to take her straight to bed…so magic. It quite paid for the other evenings when he wasn’t in, and came in sulkily slamming the door, because yet another fairy casting director had wanted his body, not his acting.
The only time they talked about the future was about Eddie’s future. There had been that time he nearly got a part in a show going to the States, and Sophie had become so excited and said she must get Peggy working overtime to make enough bags so that she could sell them there. Eddie had been firm that she mustn’t leave her place in Marble Arch, and that it would only be a couple of months’ separation. She had loved him for being so solicitous about her work.
At school they used to have a teacher who always made them “count their blessings.” Sophie remembered that it had been a hard thing to do in those days when she wanted to look like a model, and live in a house with a swimming pool. Nowadays it wasn’t really all that much easier. Blessings should be accepted, not counted. So she had Eddie, so she had her health, apart from the odd bad headache. So she had a way of earning a living that she enjoyed. At the age of twenty-seven she was in business for herself, few other women could boast that. Even if Peggy became unreliable again, she still had plenty of other people who made bags. What could be wrong with her?
A couple stopped and picked up one of Peggy’s bags. They examined the label and gave funny little cries of recognition.
“That’s the girl we met at the theatre yesterday,” said the woman. “Peggy Anderson, she said she made bags, these are lovely.”
“Do you know Peggy?” asked Sophie with interest. Peggy never mentioned anyone at all except the awful man whom she met on the couch now and then.
“Yes,” said the man, who seemed a nice chatty kind of fellow, but to Sophie’s practised eye, a chatty fellow who would be nice to meet and who would buy nothing. “We went to this lunchtime play yesterday, and got talking to a girl in the wine bar, she was waiting for her fellow to turn up. Very good-looking girl, lovely red hair.”
“They are awfully dear,” said the woman sadly. “But they are lovely. Are there any others of hers a bit cheaper?”
“What was the play?” asked Sophie suddenly, knowing somehow that they were going to say The Table Lighter, a silly little play which Eddie had seen yesterday. He had said it was a silly little play because he hadn’t got a part in it. He had also said he had gone to it with Garry, a friend of his who was an agent, a useless agent. Peggy must have gone with Eddie, she didn’t know anyone else, but why had neither of them mentioned it?
“It was The Table Lighter,” said the woman. “This Peggy says she usually goes out at lunchtime, it takes her mind off work, and her chap is an actor, very good-looking fellow. He was late because he had been seeing someone about a job, I think.”
“It’s a small world,” said the man.
“It is indeed,” agreed the woman.
“Oh very small,” said Sophie. “Did they seem very close, Peggy and this actor? I just ask because I used to be rather worried about her, you know, she didn’t seem to have much social life…I was wondering whether this might be something, well, you know, serious….”
Her heart was pounding, and she felt strangely outside herself as she asked the question. How great it was to be so cool and calm and not to panic when the world was falling down. This is what she must have been expecting all morning.
“I don’t think so, do you?” said the woman to her husband. “Not a real thing going, they just seemed to be great friends laughing and joking without a care in the world. It’s incredible to think that he’s an actor and she’s a leather worker like this. They didn’t seem to have a care in the world.”
The nice man put the bag down. Twenty pounds was too much even for the work of someone he had met.
“That’s right, I felt that too, sort of carefree. But then you know there are people who can be like that, and something sort of looks after them. It’s like as if there were a big smiling God who says, ‘Go on, Peggy and Eddie, amuse yourselves, I’ll look after you.’”
They couldn’t know as they looked at the steely green eyes of the little girl in the bag shop that they were looking into the face of a big smiling God who didn’t know how to stop smiling.
Bond Street
* * *
The light was very bright when Margaret came out of the station. Everything seemed to dazzle her. Even the daffodils on sale in big baskets seemed too harsh a yellow. People’s spring clothes seemed too loud, and the buses must have been resprayed recently. Surely they were never so aggressively red before? Or was it because there were so many of them in Oxford Street?
She was a little tired, she often felt tired before she began a shopping spree, it was tension she supposed. Nobody liked shopping, places were too crowded, assistants not at all helpful, so many foreigners who didn’t even attempt to speak English properly. Shopping was hardly something you did for fun. But then Margaret did shopping slightly differently from most people. She didn’t actually pay for the goods she brought home. Her tensions and frustrations came not from trying to catch the eye of a shop assistant, but from avoiding it.
She made a list, like any conventional shopper would do. She took a shopping bag, she always carried enough money to pay for these listed items, but rarely if ever broke into it. She paused and window-shopped. She had coffee when her feet were tired, she got into little chats with other resting shoppers. In the evening she would go home again, sighing a little on the underground until someone would stand and give her a seat. Margaret had shopped in London like this once a month for nine years. Never in those nine years had she come into contact with a store detective, a security man, or anyone remotely suspicious of her.
Blinking slightly in the sunlight, she looked at her list.
Red towels.
Knives.
Tights.
Remnants.
Pendant.
Giant cup.
Table lighter.
Jacket.
A lot of them could be “bought” in Selfridges, but she wanted a jacket from Marks, and she had seen a nice table lighter in a small souv
enir-type shop on her last visit. She might go down to Liberty’s for the remnants. She made sure that her wallet with the £84 in it was safely zipped into the pocket inside her coat. You couldn’t be too careful these days, with teams of pick-pockets coming to London from abroad. She straightened her shoulders and went off to buy towels.
She had painted the bathroom last week. Harry had been delighted with it. He said it looked really cheerful with all that white and the window frame red. He was going to buy a nice cheerful red and white bath mat, he promised.
“And I’ll get some red towels when I’m doing my shopping,” Margaret had said.
“Aren’t towels a bit dear?” Harry had wondered with a frown coming over his big kind face.
“Not if you shop around, they would be if you bought the first good ones you saw,” said Margaret.
“I don’t know what I’d do without you, you’re a great little shopper,” Harry had beamed, and Margaret felt safe when she saw his frown disappear. She felt very frightened when Harry worried, he looked so old.
The towels were easy. You pick up a big one, a middle-size one, and two small ones, you take them out under the light to examine them properly, so that you have separated them from the big piles where they are stacked. Then moving slowly, and concentrating on them carefully, looking neither left nor right, you move farther and farther away from their original place. Put down your shopping bag and examine the corners of the towels to see that they are properly finished, drop the smaller ones into the bag on the ground, never looking around, that’s the secret, then in a businesslike way fold the big one into a small manageable size and put it in on top of the others, walking with the bag held out in front of you toward the desk where it says PAY HERE. Anyone watching you would think you are taking the items to pay for them, people at PAY HERE never watch anything at all. You then ask the PAY HERE people where curtains are, and if, suppose, by some terrible chance you are stopped…then you say, “I went straight to the Pay place, and I got so absorbed in the curtains that I simply forgot.”
Margaret didn’t know what would happen if she were caught. She assumed she would be able to talk herself out of it if there were only one item in her bag, which was why she worked on the time-consuming principle of taking only one thing, and then checking it in as a parcel or in a left-luggage locker. That’s what made shopping so tiring for her, all the endless walking backward and forward to luggage lockers, but it seemed only sensible. The day she was lazy was certainly the day she would be caught.
No problem either with the knives. Nice steak knives with wooden handles, Harry would love these. She would say she had found them in the attic, that they were a present for an anniversary, a present which must have got tidied away. They would laugh together over their good fortune in having found them.
The tights were a luxury for herself. She still had good legs and she hated the kind of stockings that looked cheap and hairy. Every month she collected four or five pairs of nice sheer tights, sometimes in what they called “the new fashion shades.” She never mentioned these to Harry. He would occasionally say, “You’ve got better legs than half these women on the television,” and she would smile happily.
The remnants were for dressmaking. She wasn’t very good at it, but anyone could sew a pillowcase or a cushion cover, and it made Harry feel happy and comfortable, looking over at his wife sewing away contentedly while they watched television. She took enough to make a tablecloth too. That would only need a hem around it and Harry would never look at the edges, just at the nice bright colour on the table at breakfast, and he might say, “Imagine, you made that cloth yourself. I don’t know how other fellows manage with their wives, I really don’t.”
The pendant was a present for their son, Jerry, who was away in the North at university. It would be his birthday next week. Jerry was a worry to her, he often looked at her very hard without saying anything.
“What are you thinking about?” she’d ask.
“Nothing, Mum,” came the invariable reply, but she felt that he was staring at her, and pitying her somehow and worrying about her. She didn’t like that at all.
Once she had sent him a cashmere sweater for his birthday and he had rung up not so much to thank her as to protest.
“They cost a fortune, Mum, however did you afford it? They cost half what Dad earns in a week.”
Margaret realized she had gone too far.
“I bought it in an Oxfam shop,” she said, pretending to confess to a little economy, but her heart was pounding with fear.
“But it’s new, it’s all wrapped up in cellophane,” argued Jerry.
“Someone gave it away, a present they didn’t want.”
“They must have been mad,” grumbled Jerry, still suspicious. From then on, it had to be gifts that nobody could put a real price on. The pendant would have cost about £7 had she paid for it, but she hadn’t of course because she had asked the nice young man to show her some earrings and put the pendant in her pocket as he went to get an earring tray.
She and Harry had seen a television play the other night where the husband had his tea out of a huge china cup. Harry had smiled and said wasn’t it lovely.
“I’ve seen those in the shops,” said Margaret. “Would you like one?”
“No, it’s only silly, they cost a fortune and maybe my tea would get cold in it. It just looked nice, that’s all.”
Margaret said she had a half-memory of seeing them in a sale where they cost about fifty pence.
“Oh well then,” Harry had said and went back to looking at the television.
The one Margaret took would have cost her seven pounds fifty pence, but when she was showing it to Harry tonight she would leave out the seven pounds. She thought it was a great deal of money to pay for one cup and saucer. Sometimes she felt aggrieved if the items she took were very expensive. She liked the best, but she liked things to be good value.
The table lighter was a present for Harry’s brother and his wife, who were having a twenty-fifth anniversary party next week. Harry’s brother Martin never approved of Margaret, something Harry wouldn’t and couldn’t see in a million years. The families met rarely. A cursory visit around Christmas-time, another in the summer. Martin’s wife never had a cigarette out of her mouth, she never wore stockings, her hair was a mess, she had a loud laugh. Margaret was glad not to see too much of her. But she was always charming when they came to the house, and laughed insincere little peals when Martin said to his brother, “Well, she has you rightly tamed, Harry, never thought I’d see the day when you’d be out planting vegetables and filling window boxes.”
“Harry’s marvellous at gardening, he grows a great deal of what we eat,” Margaret would say loyally.
“That’s how you must be able to afford this place,” Martin had once said, looking around at lamps, ornaments, vases, and linen tray cloths, all carried home from Margaret’s monthly shopping trips.
“I don’t know how you afford this style, I really don’t.”
Martin had been far from helpful over that bad business years ago. Far from standing up for her and trying to keep up a good name for them, he had encouraged Harry in all that silliness.
“Never thought you had it in you,” he laughed coarsely when Margaret had called a family conference to deal with the situation. “A young lassie, too, well that beats everything.” Martin’s sluttish wife had let the cigarette ash fall down her stained cardigan with excitement. Old Harry, and a young girl from the factory, and a baby on the way. Excitements like that didn’t come very often.
Margaret wondered whether the table lighter was too good for them. After all they would have humiliated her, set her adrift if they had had their way. Why should she get them anything? But still, it was all part of the scheme, the plan, the whole elaborate complicated business that made her victory assured. She had to be the perfect sister-in-law as well as the perfect wife. Only a perfect sister-in-law, herself a non-smoker, would be so thoughtful as to give
something like a table lighter. So quietly it went into the bag. Later she would get a really cheap box for it, they would assume it had cost a couple of quid instead of twenty. They would be surprised it worked so well. Part of Margaret’s good taste.
It would be a dull evening at their anniversary. Their children were loud, too, and drank beer from cans. The lazy wife would make a small attempt at food, but it might only be sandwiches and trifle. There would be a lot of drink of course. And sometime in the evening Martin would nudge Harry and ask him were there any more little girls that he could pass on to his old brother, and Harry would look sheepish and silly and hope that Margaret hadn’t heard.
Martin would love Margaret to have her comeuppance even at this late stage. He couldn’t believe how well she had managed that business years ago. Looking back on it, Margaret herself often wondered how she had been able to cope with it.
There was Harry, all shuffling and foolish, and not able to look at anyone. There was this girl, small, fat, very fat now that she was five months pregnant. There was her father, a bit older than Harry, and even more shuffling, and everyone shouting about money, and rights and duties, and doing the proper thing, and not letting anyone get away with anything. Until Margaret had spoken.
“The only decision we have to make is this,” she had said. “If Harry accepts that he is the father of this child, then he must marry the lady as soon as possible and give the child a name and a home. I will take our son and this house, and whatever it costs for both of us to live here. Harry must provide for two families, he will have no access to my home. I’m sure, with overtime, he’ll earn enough to keep us all.”
Her voice sounded so calm that everyone stopped shouting and listened. Martin and his wife had been invited especially to give more support, but they sat open-mouthed through it all.
“If Harry thinks that he is only one of several people who might be the baby’s father, then he should give the lady some money towards the upkeep of the child—a small lump sum, to thank her for his pleasure, and to acknowledge some limited degree of responsibility.”