My American

by Stella Gibbons

Amy’s lips moved. After a second she whispered:

  “Miss Lathom, is he dead?”

  Miss Lathom nodded, and gently tightened her clasp until Amy’s cheek rested in silence against her shoulder.

  CHAPTER VI

  ON A FINE afternoon two days later the funeral procession set out from Highbury. The two cars, followed by a third which was none other than that of Mr. Porteous and driven by that prince of good fellows himself, went slowly past the interested gaze of a few women on the pavement until it reached the end of the Walk and then moved forward at a brisker pace along the Holloway Road to Highgate Cemetery. Edie’s grave was there and Tim would be buried beside her.

  “That coffin hasn’t many flowers, has it?” remarked more than one onlooker. There were only four wreaths for Tim; a cross made of daffodils from the Beedings, an anchor of laurel leaves with a very large card attached—“From E. Talbot Porteous, with Deepest Sympathy,” a beautiful sheaf of narcissus and white tulips from the staff of The Prize, and a circle of rich wallflowers (Miss Seager’s suggestion; “unusual, and not so dreadfully funerally-looking as most wreaths, girls”) from Amy’s form at the Anna Bonner.

  Amy’s own small bunch of freesias was buried under Porty’s laurels. The flowers did not make much of a show, spread out forlornly along the coffin.

  In the second car sat Amy, almost hidden by the bulk of Mrs. Beeding, who had bought her a black coat and hat at Jones Brothers of Holloway that morning, taking it for granted that as the only living relative her father had in the world, she would of course go to his funeral. Dora protested in vain that kids never did, and it was a damned shame to drag the poor little devil along like that, and enough to upset her for weeks even worse than she was already, and even Mr. Beeding put in a word against it. But Mrs. Beeding seldom listened to what Mr. Beeding had to say and she stood firm; she had a very strongly developed sense of what was demanded by the human relationships, and she would sweep aside convention, even inclination, without hesitation in order that proper respect and duty might be paid to an aged aunt, to some worthy cousin four times removed. There was that time she got up against the doctor’s orders a week after having Artie and went to Uncle Barker’s funeral; that just showed you what she was. So Amy went, looking like a little white-faced doll in her new black. She did not much mind going, except that she was frightened of seeing the grave because it would make her think of The Lady Ligeia’s Entombment, and so she had decided to shut her eyes while the actual burying was going on; no one would notice.

  She had cried so much in the last two days that her head felt empty and light. She was so dreadfully lonely! She peeped out of the window as the car moved along the Holloway Road, staring at the crowds hurrying past in the spring sunshine. So many people, in so many cities all over the huge world! and not one of them belonged to her or would know who you meant if you said, “Amy Lee.” For the first time in her life she wondered what was going to become of her.

  But then she glanced sideways at Mrs. Beeding’s stout person, looking grave yet somehow not dismal in the black coat and hat bought for the funeral of Uncle Barker, and she felt a little better.

  Mrs. Beeding had been so kind. She had come round to the school at once to fetch Amy home, and after a little talk with Miss Lathom (they had seemed to like each other, Amy had thought afterwards, though she had been crying too miserably to be aware of this at the time) she had asked one of the maids to telephone for a taxi because Amy felt too upset to walk. And all the afternoon she had sat beside Amy in her little bedroom, giving her sips of still lemonade to drink and putting a wet handkerchief on her forehead because she had given herself a headache with all that crying. Amy had gone to sleep that night in Mrs. Beeding’s bed (poor Mr. Beeding having been banished to a sofa in the Lounge) with Baby slumbering in a crib at the foot, and her hand held fast in Mrs. Beeding’s work-roughened one.

  Mrs. Beeding had certainly made things better, and she was comforting without slopping over you and trying to nose out what you were thinking about like Mona or snapping cheerfully at you and trying to make you forget all about it like Dora. But although the Beeding men had been very kind as well, with Artie (prompted by Maurice) offering Amy a suck off his Halfpenny Wonder and Maurice himself inviting her to accompany him to the pictures next Saturday afternoon and Mr. Beeding baking her a special tiny loaf with A on it surrounded by a curly twist—none of these comforting things really got inside her mind where the frightening lonely feeling was. She thanked them all in a whisper, and just for a minute felt a little better, but the feeling always came back again.

  After the funeral was over, and Amy had slowly opened her eyes, stinging because she had screwed them up so tightly in order not to see the coffin sink into the grave, they walked slowly back to the car. The flowers arranged on the bare mound of earth trembled in the mild wind and the sunlight made their petals look transparent. Old Porty came glumly up to Amy and Mrs. Beeding, touching his hat with a despairing sort of flourish, and walked beside them in silence.

  Porty was not directly to blame for Tim’s death. It was not his car that had been crashed into by a lorry whose driver, half-dazed for want of sleep, had been trying to deliver a load on time. Tim and Porty had picked up one or two of the boys on the way back from Cornwall and Tim had come back in a boy’s car; it was this that had been destroyed and its unfortunate driver, as well as Tim, instantly killed. But Tim would never have gone to Cornwall and his death had it not been for Old Porty, and Mrs. Beeding, in the glance she gave Old Porty, amply conveyed as much.

  “Well, well. Poor old Tiger.” Old Porty compressed his lips and shook his head and looked quite frighteningly like a vulture. “I can’t believe it—can’t realize the poor old bu—poor old chap’s gone. Why, only the other night he was showing us all how to shift it at the local in one of those godforsaken little holes we stopped at on the way back—had us all in fits. Roaring, we were, simply holding on to the mantelpiece. And now he’s gone.” Porty shook his head and glanced at Mrs. Beeding, who was marching along with her fair-skinned face severe under the Uncle Barker hat.

  “Ay, it’s very sad,” observed Mrs. Beeding, barely parting her lips and then shutting them up once more.

  “And how’s Amy, eh?” Porty bent to peer at the little girl in black walking quietly at Mrs. Beeding’s side. “Poor little girl. Ah, Tiger often talked to me about you, Amy.”

  She glanced up at his cruel purple face, dark like an ogre’s against the pure blue sky, and gave him a steady look from under the brim of her hat. Her eyes were red, but washed wonderfully clear by weeping.

  “I’m all right, thank you, Mr. Porteous.”

  “That’s right.” Porty gave her black-ribboned pigtail a subdued yet jovial tug. “That’s a real little sport. Always be a sport, little girl. Yer father was—poor old Tiger. One of the best. Ah, well, wherever he is now, he’s at rest, poor old bu—poor old chap. Yes, well, I suppose I must be toddling. So long, Amy. So long, Mrs. B. I won’t say good-bye, I’m often round this way and I’ll pop in and see you some time, eh?”

  “Aye. I expect you will,” said Mrs. Beeding. Amy stared at the ground.

  Bloody women, thought Old Porty turning aside to begin preliminary fiddlings with his car (which like most of the things always had some minor ailment troubling it). Sour-faced b—s. Gawping at me as if the whole business was my fault. I can’t help it. Gave me a—nasty turn; I shan’t forget it in a hurry. Two hours till they open. … Christ, what a country!

  With a vague wave of his hand to the Beedings and Amy he drove quickly away. One of the Boys had gone; the Boys, whose business it was to make one another forget unpleasant facts like duty and death. Sons of the cup and the lyre, priests of pleasure, leagued in a vague resentment against women—what business had one of the Boys to go and die suddenly, letting in the draught on all the rest? Already in Old Porty’s mind Tim was “Chap I used to know in advertising. Came to a sticky end … hit a lorry one night.” With this epitaph
Porty buried his friend.

  While the Beedings were speaking to the driver of their car, a middle-aged gentleman in a dark blue overcoat came briskly towards them. He had already been noticed by them as he stood in the group at the graveside, and Dora and Mona were wondering who he could be. A handsomish car parked near their own seemed to be his, for he unlocked it before he came over and addressed Mrs. Beeding.

  “Good-afternoon,” he said pleasantly, taking off his hat and holding it while he spoke. “My name is Ramage. I’m representing The Prize. Is this the little girl—his daughter?”

  He bent a little, just as Old Porty had, to look into Amy’s face, and she slowly lifted her gaze from the ground and met the friendly look on a reddish, kindly countenance with observant eyes.

  “Ay, this is Amy.” Mrs. Beeding knew a gentleman when she met one but was not permitted by Yorkshire to address him as “sir.”

  “I want to tell you, my dear,” continued Mr. Ramage, “how very sorry we all are on the paper, and how much your father will be missed.”

  “Very kind of you, I’m sure,” responded Mrs. Beeding. “There, Amy,” for she was anxious that her charge should show pretty manners. “Isn’t that kind?”

  “Thank you,” murmured Amy, giving Mr. Ramage the clear look she had given Old Porty, but with a difference.

  “And what are you going to do now, Amy?” pursued Mr. Ramage, collecting her name from Mrs. Beeding’s speech and making easy use of it to increase the friendliness of his own. “Have you any relatives or friends to take care of you?”

  He spoke almost lightly, so as not to distress her and perhaps make her cry, yet his question held real interest and concern. Because of her appalling black outfit and the fact that she should, of course, never have been allowed to attend the funeral at all, Mr. Ramage was attracted by Amy. It was a shocking sight, a child at a funeral, and Mr. Ramage, a father of daughters, liked the look of this child. He was perhaps the first stranger in her life to do so. He stood smiling down upon her, waiting for the answer that she suddenly found herself too lonely and miserable to give.

  “Oh yes, she’s goin’ to stay with us.” Mrs. Beeding at length answered for her, pulling Amy’s hand within her arm. “We’ll take good care of her; that’ll be all right, won’t it, luv?”

  Amy nodded, and Mr. Ramage, pleased by the warmth of that “luv,” felt a little easier about her.

  Yet not altogether easy. She was quite plainly porcelain to the Beeding’s clay, and Mr. Ramage knew that porcelain, especially the natural porcelain that does not get its fine glaze from money and culture, can crack and chip with painful ease when bumping alongside earthenware pots. Also, Mrs. Beeding’s little mouth was very firm indeed.

  “You see,” Mrs. Beeding went on in a lower tone, looking steadily at him, “Mr. Lee’s left his Insurance Policy for her all paid up, an’ by the time the funeral’s paid for (me and Mr. Beeding’s seein’ to that, just for the time being) she’ll have about two hundred and seventy pounds, the Company said. I went down to see them yesterday afternoon. So that’ll keep her going at school for another three years easy, and when she leaves there’ll still be a bit over to start her learnin’ dressmakin’ or somethin’.”

  “I’m very relieved to hear that,” Mr. Ramage answered in the same lowered tone. He looked down curiously at the top of the future dressmaker’s doleful black straw hat; he could just see the tip of a creamy nose and a tiny but firm chin. Poor scrap. Mr. Ramage thought of his own two healthy girls at a boarding school in Eastbourne and reflected, not for the first time in his life, that the world was an uncertain and frightening place. If he, a successful man, found it so, what must it seem to Amy Lee?

  But there, she had two hundred and seventy pounds and Mrs. Beeding. She was better off than some. He said a friendly good-afternoon to Mrs. Beeding, shook hands with Amy and said, “Good-bye, Amy. I hope very much that everything turns out well for you,” and drove away in his car to Muswell Hill, where he lived (for Mr. Ramage had reached that point of grandeur in business life at which a person does not dream of returning to the office when an afternoon engagement has kept him out later than three o’clock).

  He drove away; and in a week he had almost forgotten the little Lee girl. Almost, but not quite; somewhere at the back of his mind lingered her demure name and secret little face.

  “That’s a real nice man, Dora,” commented Mrs. Beeding, settling herself comfortably as their car moved off. “A gentleman, that was. Aye, I shan’t half be glad to get these shoes off me, they’re fair punishing my feet.”

  “Mr. Porteous didn’t know where to put his face, Mum,” said Dora. “He’d never say so, the old monkey, but he feels bad about it, I’m sure. Notice him sucking up to Aime?”

  “He told me I’d got gorgeous hair,” giggled Mona, twining a red finger in and out of the sausages. “I do think he’s awful”

  “He’s a wicked man and God will punish him for it one o’ these days,” stated her mother without heat. “And you’re a silly girl to be pleased with his lies. Now you stop messing about with your hair, Mona, and sit quiet; everybody can see us sitting up here and it don’t do to jig about.”

  “Oh, I do hope Baby’s all right,” sighed Mona, wisely turning the conversation. “She don’t like Mrs. Flower much, does she, Dora?”

  “Baby’s all right, Mona. Mrs. Flower’ll look after her. You just be quiet, now, will you. Amy, luv, I expect yer want yer tea. You had no dinner an’ you’ll be clemmed.”

  “Yes, I do rather, Mrs. Beeding, please.”

  “Aye, so do I. Well, we’ll soon be home.”

  They were all tired with the emotions and excitements of the day, and leant back and let the remainder of the drive pass in a not unpleasant languour. When grief is not so personal as to be agonizing, and duty has been done, and our spirits have been awed and calmed by a brushing acquaintance with death, there is a subdued pleasure in taking up the routine of daily life once more; it is as if we had been shown, for an instant by a lightning flash, the dear-ness of the simple things we must one day leave for ever.

  When the car had put them down outside the shop and driven away, and they had taken off their outdoor clothes and reclaimed Baby from pretty little Mrs. Flower, and tea was being got ready in the kitchen, there was a feeling of relief in the air that gave a fresh cheerfulness to everyone except Amy. Dora had asked for leave from the office, Mona had stayed away from school, Mrs. Beeding had entrusted the shop to Mr. Beeding and Baby to Mrs. Flower, all in order that Amy might have their support at her father’s funeral; but now that it was over they could not pretend to any personal grief over Mr. Lee. Mrs. Beeding, indeed, was so relieved to find that Amy had a little bit of money and could now be brought up proper and made into a good decent girl with a trade at her finger’s ends, that she found herself feeling quite glad that Tim was dead. Mrs. Beeding had already had a little talk with Amy, and arranged to open an account for her at Barclays on the corner of the High Street where Mr. Beeding banked the takings from the shop. And Amy would pay Mrs. Beeding twelve and sixpence a week for her keep, and Mrs. Beeding had found time to slip round and see Miss Lathom at the Anna Bonner and inform her that Amy would stay on at school until she was fifteen, her fees being paid regular at the beginning of every term. Everything, in fact, was arranged for Amy and all she had to do now was to get out of her mopey ways and stop fretting.

  Amy sat at tea that afternoon for the first time as a member of the family, with Dora on one side and the red-haired Maurice on the other. All round her was the chatter of cheerful voices, the clink of spoons and clash of china, the passing of full or empty cups down the table, demands for “more paste, please,” “pass the bread, will you, Dora,” and the smell of hot tea and fresh dough cake. Mrs. Beeding sat at one end, pouring out competently for everybody yet getting her own meal as well, and Mr. Beeding had managed to wake himself up in time for tea for once, and sat at the other, keeping an eye on Baby and supplying her with fingers of
bread to sop in her milk-and-tea; he was very fond of her and spent much of what leisure he got with her. All down the table the yellow or carroty heads of the Beedings bobbed busily as they ate and drank and talked to each other, and the two dark heads of Amy and Mr. Beeding looked oddly out of place among so many fair ones. It was a lively scene in the big clean kitchen, with Baby’s cries and clumsy little movements making everyone pause now and then to exclaim admiringly at her and bless her little heart; the dough cake was rich and light, the tea strong and sweet, and the paste savoury. There was laughter and fun and plenty for everyone. Family life at its best.

  Yet Amy sat there crumbling cake, with the room dancing through shimmering tears, only longing to get up and say, “Thank you very much for asking me to tea, Mrs. Beeding. I think I’d better be going now,” and escape upstairs to the quiet, deserted rooms at the top of the house where the golden light of evening poured through the closed windows. She had had enough of the Beedings. For nine hours she had never been out of the company of some sort of Beeding, and as her natural air was solitude, she was beginning to feel desperate with the need to escape. And she was just beginning to understand, as she sat there at tea in the middle of the Beedings, that she would never be able to escape again.

  At first she was unconsciously glad to be with them because they were comforting and she was too miserable to think much about her secret world, but now her thoughts kept returning to The Mummy’s Curse and the Pony Express riders; she wondered if the cut-out Mabel Purdey had survived last night’s high wind, and if the little American boy’s father was alive and if he was a nice father. In short, her thoughts were beginning to get back to normal, as people’s thoughts do after a funeral, but Amy’s returned from a daze of grief to find their owner in a foreign world.

  The Beedings have got me now, she thought, and I’ll never be able to get away. It will be awful. If I say can I go upstairs to the flat for a bit they’ll say “What for?” And Mona’ll want to come too. And where can I write The Mummy’s Curse without them seeing and wanting to read it? And Mrs. Beeding’ll never let me fly cut-outs out of the lounge window. And where will I sleep? If I have to sleep with Mona I swear I’ll kill myself, I’ll keep on buying ether for a toothache and save it up until I’ve got a whole jug full and then drink it. And where will I keep all my things? Oh, it’s going to be dreadful. What shall I do?