My American

by Stella Gibbons

  “There we are. All nice and cosy, eh, Amy?” He stretched out his legs under the table, kicked her ankle, and said, “Oh, sorry, Amy! Did I hurt you?”

  “Oh, no, thank you, Mr. Porteous.”

  “Call me Porty, do, Amy.”

  “Porty,” she repeated obediently, staring round the A.B.C. and thinking it would be a good place to make two spies meet in a story, because everyone was so busy trying to signal a waitress or eating or talking that they were not noticing what anyone else was doing.

  “Now, what’ll you have, Amy? Have anything you like, little girl. This is my treat, yer know. Azza mattera fact,” he lowered his voice embarrassedly and bent forward, staring at her with his bright fierce little eyes in their deep caverns overhung by the long white hairs of his eyebrows, “I’ve been wanting to give yer a little treat for a long time, Amy. Justa show there wasn’t any ill-feeling between us. About yer Dad, I mean.”

  “Oh.” She nodded, as embarrassed as he, and not knowing what to say.

  “Yer know, Amy, there was never any question about me and yer Dad being tiddley or anything like that,” Porty went on, while his eyes wandered fiercely round the room in search of a waitress. “We were both cold sober. Believe me, I haven’t been on the road driving me own bother-and-fuss for twenty years without knowing anyone who tries to drive when he’s had one over the eight’s a b.f. The other poor devil wasn’t tiddley either, nor the poor b—(beg pardon) of a lorry driver either, he was jus’ half-asleep in his seat, thass all … what I’m trying to say is, Amy, it was just cruel bad luck and no one’s fault, see? Cruel bad luck.” He pressed his thin lips together and stared down at the glass top of the table. “And so sudden! Cripes, there wasn’t time to hold on tight fer the shock before he was inter ’im. Like that!” He drove his fist hard against his open palm, then glanced fretfully round the room and jerked his head at a waitress, who nodded did but not come. The place was full of people having a snack before going along to the first house at the pictures, and all the girls were busy.

  “She’ll be along in a minute. Not in a hurry, are yer, Amy?”

  “Oh, no, Porty.” It was exceedingly queer to be sitting here in the big steamy teashop with the late afternoon sunlight pouring through the windows, and Old Porty the ogre, the lurking shadow of her childhood that had ruined so many jaunts to the pictures, sitting opposite her!

  “Did yer get the insurance all right, girlie?”

  “Oh yes, thank you. Mrs. Beeding put it into the bank for me.”

  “Ah, she’s got her head screwed on the right way, but I’m glad she don’t handle my Friday packet! About run through it by now I expect, haventcher?”

  “Mrs. Beeding says I’ve got about seventy pounds left. You see, I haven’t had to spend much of it at a time, because I’ve had my salary from the office; they started me at a pound a week and then last year Lord Welwoodham (that’s the Editor) gave me a five-bob rise and this year he gave me another five bob (a week, I mean). That’s very good, isn’t it.”

  Porty nodded, and not superciliously; he too, thought it good, for he knew the post-war world of employment and the hideous struggle to find jobs and keep them, and the scandals of over-and-under paying.

  “And he says I’m a sort of editorial assistant now, not an office girl any more. But of course,” she ended, looking a little sobered at the thought, “Miss Grace and Mr. Danesford (she’s the secretary and he’s the sub-editor)—they still call me the office girl. I don’t think they liked me getting the rises, either.”

  “Jealous,” nodded Old Porty. “Don’t tell me. I know.”

  “So I have a good lot left for myself, you see, ’cos I only have to give Mrs. Beeding twelve and six a week and I never draw out any money from the bank unless I want something in a hurry or like when we went to Bracing Bay this year.”

  “Ah, Bracing Bay—that’s the place! Best air in Europe, my doctor says; yer can smell it the minute yer put yer nose out of the train—MISS!!” roared Porty, half rising from his seat, and a waitress came over to their table.

  “Now, Amy, whattlya have? Have something solid, the damage is on me.”

  “Oh—fruit salad and cream, please.”

  “That isn’t much. Have something solid. How about fish cakes and tomater sauce? Salmon mayernaise? Egg on chips? Yer can have yer fruit salad and cream afterwards, yer know,” he added. “I want yer to have everything yer want because of—you know. Now go on, Amy, choose.”

  It ended in her having fish cakes with tomato sauce, and him having two eggs on a double portion of chips, with a roll and butter each and a pot of tea for two; and presently they were eating together as amicably as two old friends. Amy poured out the tea and dropped in Porty’s three lumps for him, and then they were quiet for a little while, taking the edge off their hunger and gazing rather glassily but peacefully about them while they ate.

  People are always writing sniffy bits about teashops. Of course, they don’t mention names because they are afraid of libel actions, but they go on for pages about the damp steamy atmosphere and the flat feet of the waitresses and the tea drips on the tables and the miserable faces of the customers and the tasteless food, and any reader who doesn’t skip that bit knows where they mean. In fact, teashops are perfect caverns of romance for people with eyes in their heads rather than bees in their bonnets; and heaven knows there are thousands of worse places where a person might sit in the late afternoon, adding more and more water to the ever-weakening tea in the pot and smoking while talking, and listening to an unexacting friend. But be warned, and never take an orchid to such places; orchids spoil the atmosphere by wishing they were in Assisi or at Gunter’s and the tea-y smell upsets them and they notice smears and drips and can’t find a thing on the menu to eat. Never again.

  Amy and Old Porty had their faults, but neither of them was an orchid, so they enjoyed their high tea very much. Presently, as she was carefully dipping the last fragment of fish cake into the last tiny pool of tomato sauce, Amy said, looking intently at her plate:

  “Mr. Porteous, I want to ask your advice about something.”

  “Ask away. I’ll tell you anything you like—if only you’ll call me Porty,” he replied, with a sudden gleam of interest deep down in the eye caverns. “You just think of me as though I was yer Dad and say anything yer like to me. I’m a good many years older than you are, little girl, and I know this wicked old world; I know the words and the music, I read the book and seen the pictures, and anything there is to know about certain subjects you can bet your last brass farthing I know it,” and he bent towards her, trying to look sympathetic and wise.

  “Well, said Amy, taking a sip of tea, “suppose you knew somebody who wanted to get a letter from somebody and didn’t want anyone at their home—the first somebody’s home, I mean—to know about it. What would that person do? The one who wanted to receive the letter, I mean?”

  “What would they do?” repeated Porty, looking a little dazed and also a little disappointed. “How do you mean, do, little girlie? Say it again slowly.”

  “Well … suppose you wrote to me.”

  He nodded, frowning with the effort of concentration.

  “And I didn’t want Mrs. Beeding to know.”

  He nodded again.

  “Well, where could you send the letter?”

  Light, glorious as the alpine dawn, broke over Porty.

  “Ah—ha! Now I rumble yer! One of yer boys wants to write to you, and yer don’t want Mrs. Beeding to find out! Is that is?”

  She nodded, her big clear brown eyes looking steadily at him across the brim of the cup she was holding to her lips.

  “Well, there I can help you, of course—but you’re a naughty little girl, you know, a very naughty little girl! and I ought really to smack yer beatyem instead of tipping you the wink like this—but I’m not going to smack yer beatyem, I’m going to help yer, little girl, because yer Dad was my pal. And we’re pals, too, aren’t we, Amy? Say, ‘Porty, we’r
e pals’.”

  “Porty, we’re pals,” she repeated, looking demurely at him and thinking how ugly he was.

  “That’s right. Well now, about what yer asked me. Yer’ve come to just the right person, sermatterofact, because I get all my letters sent this way when I’m on the road, have done for years. Well, you find your nearest Branch Post Office. That means a proper office, not one in a shop, see? And tell them you’re a visitor in London or haven’t got a permanent address, and so you want to have your letters sent there for a bit, see? You’ll have to show them a letter addressed to you, or your Post Office Savings Book to show them you’re who you make out to be. Then you just tell your boy to write to you care o’ that Post Office, and they’ll mind it for you till you call for it. It’ll be safe as the ruddy Bank of England.” Porty drained his tea and slapped down the cup. “And nobody’ll be a penny the wiser. There! How’s that, umpire?”

  “Thank you very much, Porty. I’ll tell him.”

  “Who is it, Amy? Tell Old Porty all about it,” leaning across the table again and gazing at her with his head on one side. “Do yer love him very much?”

  Her instinct was to reply in Dora-ese, “Oh, he’ll pass in a crowd with a shove,” but she saw that this would not do at all and substituted for it a single nod, with her long eyelashes modestly lowered.

  Porty sighed. “And what’s his name, lucky young beggar? Ah, Amy, I wish I had a lovely young girl to care about me.”

  “Michael. Michael Danesford,” she answered. “He’s Mr. Danesford’s son. The one in the office, you know, the sub-editor. You see, he can’t write to me at the office because his father’s there all day. It’s very awkward. It all started about a month ago,” Amy went on, leaning forward in her chair with her eyes, very bright, fixed upon the sympathetic face of Porty. “He came in one day to see his father, and Mr. Danesford happened to have gone out on business for Lord Welwoodham and I was there alone.”

  “Were you and all!” exclaimed Porty, still sympathetic but unable to resist the temptation. “What a chance! Well, did he kiss you on the spot?”

  “Oh, no. Not then. You see, his father came back and we had to stop talking to each other and pretend nothing had happened, but he told me he had fallen in love with me and said he wanted to see me again, but he was going to Italy for the rest of his holiday and then of course he would have to go back to college—”

  “Oh. Still at college, is he? Well, I’ve never had a college education meself and can’t say I’ve ever felt the want of it, but I daresay it’s very nice if you’ve got the money. And what’s he like? Handsome?”

  “Oh, yes! Tall and fair, with grey eyes and lovely broad shoulders,” she answered at once. This was her idea of manly beauty and always had been, like a picture in her mind.

  Something in this remark appeared to amuse Old Porty very much, for he laughed a good deal to himself, shaking his own shoulders and also his bald head and glancing furtively round the room as though wishing he could see someone with whom to share the joke.

  “And what’s he want to do about it? Marry yer?” he demanded at last.

  Amy nodded. “Some day,” she said demurely.

  “Well, it all sounds very romantic but you take my advice, girlie, and watch your step,” said Porty, suddenly cross, looking disagreeably at the slender girl sitting opposite him in her white cotton frock patterned with red flowers.

  She had taken off her hat, and the coils of fine dark hair at either side of her head made her look a little different from all the other girls in the teashop with their curls, but she was not pretty. Her forehead was too high to suit that style of hairdressing and her face lacked warmth and expression. It was like a thin delicate mask modelled while the original was asleep; and it seemed to have lost its childish look without gaining the indescribable bloom, the bud-like colour and dew, that comes with normal youth. She was not weazened, for her skin was clear and fine as ivory, but she might well have been a woman of thirty who had lived a quiet, sad life. Everyone in her small circle, except the Beeding girls, said she was such a nice, quiet, reliable girl, so sensible for her age, none of this disgusting paint and powder and waved hair business, just the sort of good old-fashioned girl that men, alas, never look at because, the beasts, they prefer something else. But Mona and Dora always swore that old Aime was a dark horse. Why they did so, whether their conviction was based upon some action of Amy’s that did not quite square with the general idea of her character or whether they simply felt it, with the simple power of judging its contemporaries which youth possesses, they never said. But whenever some old trout trotted out the stock remarks about Aime, Mona and Dora said meaningly, “Don’t you be too sure, Auntie—or Granny—or Mrs. Todbottle—Aime’s a bit of a dark horse.”

  “Oh, I will,” the dark horse now assured Porty earnestly. “I’ll be ever so careful. And thank you very much for your advice and for my tea, I have enjoyed it so much—Porty.”

  “That’s all right. Glad to have been of any use,” said Porty, still crossly but obviously a little soothed. “Didn’t mean ter say anything against yer boy, but it never does a girl any harm to be on the look-out, yer know.”

  Amy nodded.

  “And I know yer Dad wouldn’t like yer to get up to anything like that because he was a gentleman, poor old Tiger, good luck to him wherever he is, and if he’s looking down on us now he’ll know I’m on’y saying what I did say to yer for the best, Amy.”

  “Yes, Porty,” she said, looking at him solemnly.

  “Well. There we are then,” concluded Porty, looking round fretfully once more for a waitress. “I wish I could do a bit more for yer, Amy. If I had a place where yer could meet yer boy, I’d let yer have the run of it, and no questions asked. I know I can trust two clean, decent kids not to get up to anything their mothers wouldn’t like,” giving her a severe look. “But I haven’t, so I can’t.”

  “Where do you live, Porty?”

  “Murray’s Hotel, King’s Cross,” said Porty, fumbling in his pocket. “Been there for ten years now. It’s not at all a bad little place, really, and they don’t do you as badly as some. Oh, I’m part of the fittings there now; got me own table, and my waiter’s always got a word for me when I get back after a trip. I like that, yer know. Makes it more like home. There’s a tip fer you, girlie, if ever you’re landed in a strange town, you make for the hotel nearest the station. It’s pretty sure to be good because all the commercials drop in there straight off the train and they won’t put up with—MISS!!”

  A waitress came unhurriedly across and made out their bill, which Porty magnificently paid.

  “Now where can I drop you, Amy?” he inquired when they were once more standing by the car.

  “Oh, I’ll be all right, it’s no distance home,” she said. She added hastily, on observing a black cloud rush across his jovial front (these princes of good fellows were certainly tricky to deal with; you never knew when they would fly into a tigerish fury over absolutely nothing at all). “And besides, I’m rather afraid of Mona seeing us and being, well, a bit jealous.”

  “Would she, the little devil! I must smack her beatyem some time for that!” cried Porty, enchanted, his good temper quite restored. “Oh well, if you’re sure you’ll be all right. Good-bye, Amy, and many thanks for the pleasure of your company, my dear.” He took her hand and squeezed it. “We must meet again soon, eh?”

  “Yes, please, Porty. I’d like to.”

  “That’s the ticket. And don’t forget what I said. Ro-mance is all very well, but you keep your eyes skinned! Cheery-bye!”

  And Porty drove away, waving without looking round, into the traffic of the High Street.

  Amy walked quickly away, wiping her hand hard against her dress. She was not afraid of him any more, but he was very stupid and horrid and she hated his jokes and the way he flew into rages and had to be soothed down and managed, exactly like the Beeding baby at home, except that Baby was pretty and funny and Porty was neither. Oh, w
ell, she had got the information she wanted and that was all that mattered. She walked quickly homewards, not noticing, as she usually did, the pavements, patterned with the dust of a rainless August, the burnt brown leaves lying in the gutters, the exhausted pale faces of bus and tram conductors with their shirts open at the neck, the quivering filthy-smelling haze of hot petrol that hung above the jammed, shaking traffic. She walked quickly homewards with a dream. Mr. Antrobus was responsible for the dream. If she had not gone to his house that morning, it would never have entered her head.

  Exactly a week ago she had been sitting at her table in the outer office putting manuscripts into their envelopes ready to be returned, when Mr. Danesford came out of the Editor’s room where he had been speaking to Lord Welwoodham and said:

  “Lord Welwoodham wants you to go to Mr. Antrobus’s house and fetch some copy. If you go at once you will be back in time for Miss Grace to go out at one.”

  He seldom used her name in addressing her, and always gave his instructions in this dry clear style without details or explanations.

  Pleased at the prospect of a break in the morning’s routine, and also a little excited at the thought of seeing the famous Mr. Antrobus’s house, Amy put on her hat while bending over the address book (unaltered since 1909) to make quite sure of his house’s number—73 Regent’s Gate, Regent’s Park. She went over and stood by Mr. Danesford’s desk to receive final instructions.

  Miss Grace had neither looked up from her work nor commented upon Mr. Danesford’s announcement, for she made a point of never intruding upon his side of the work unless it was strictly necessary, a piece of almost inhuman self-control which may have prevented the development of backslappery in the Outer Office but which also undoubtedly helped to preserve its peace.

  Miss Grace was employed at this moment in typing some letters which Lord Welwoodham had just dictated. She looked no older than when Amy had first seen her nearly three years ago, for she was covering that great stretch of life when a person’s looks do not alter, unless blasted by illness or sorrow, between maturity and the beginning of old age. But she was more tastefully dressed than ever in a coat and skirt of pink linen, a white ruffled blouse embroidered with gay bunches of flowers, a necklace of small foreign seeds decorated with coloured spots and strung on a gilt chain, and a large brooch of glittering mixed jewels, and pearl earrings. Most of her salary was spent on her clothes, for her circumstances as the only daughter of a successful retired game and poultry merchant were comfortable. Her father and mother, two plump old people who pottered cheerfully about the garden of a large Victorian house in Hendon, often wondered to each other how they could have produced such a piece of efficiency, decorum and elegance as their daughter. She made them feel sub-human. Nevertheless, Mrs. Grace most frequently referred to her daughter in her absence as “Poor Lena,” while old Mr. Grace had a habit of pausing on his way through the hall to the garden with a pot in one hand and a dibber in the other, and contemplating his child as she stood drawing on her gloves ready to depart for the office in some glorious new outfit, and observing in a low tone with a shake of his head: