The Beloved Girls

by Harriet Evans

  There was a cloth spread on the lawn, along with the remains of a tea party, at which several guests remained: two teddy bears – both huge, with large silk bows around their necks – a giraffe, in green, and a glassy-eyed doll in a broderie anglaise frock. All of these were upended and lying on the lawn. A miniature tea service, exquisite pink and cream, was scattered across the garden, crumbs and tea everywhere. Beside the cloth, a sketchbook and pencils, laid across the pad. He always remembered that detail. How neat they were, perfectly sharpened.

  Sylvia did not seem to notice the mess. She was not self-conscious. There was a strangely adult quality about her, and Simon could not be sure of her age. She might be nine, or fifteen. She clasped Morris to her with pleasure, but otherwise left him to roam disconsolately about as they chatted. Where was Captain Lestrange from? Did he know this part of town? What kind of gloves? Where had he been stationed? Had he been into Soho, to one of the espresso bars? The buses into town, were they good? Did he use them?

  ‘Haven’t you been on a bus?’ he said, astonished.

  She laughed. ‘Not for the longest time. My mother used to take me. But I don’t live with her any more.’

  Simon felt stupid. ‘I . . . see. That’s sad.’

  ‘There are far sadder things.’ But she didn’t meet his eye. She clasped Morris again and kissed his thick marmalade fur, then raked her fingers through his ginger stomach. A neatly tailored woman passed them on the street, glancing into the pretty little garden. She ran her eyes over both of them.

  ‘Hello, Mrs Pinney,’ said Sylvia, eagerly.

  ‘Hello, Sylvia,’ the woman said, pushing the pram she was holding even faster than before.

  Simon saw the look in Sylvia’s eyes as she turned to scoop tiny teacups onto the tray.

  ‘Look, I’d best be going,’ he said, heaving himself up from the wall.

  Her hand flew to the reddening scratch on her cheek. ‘Oh, stay, won’t you? Just for a bit? There’s a spider in the kitchen, and I’m terrified of it. I don’t want to go back into the house.’ She grinned at him, and he saw the wide gap in her teeth, the shine of blue glinting in her black hair.

  He was so often alone. He did not hesitate. ‘I’d love to,’ he said, and as Sylvia clapped her hands in pleasure he swung one leg over the low wall, carefully avoiding the flowerbeds, and stepped onto the lawn.

  She handed him some tea from one of the tiny leftover cups. Simon rubbed his eyes, wondering if he had somehow stepped through the looking-glass.

  ‘Thank you!’ he said. He felt nervous, uneasy, all of a sudden – he had climbed over another man’s fence into his garden and was sitting there as if he owned the place. But it was too late now.

  He reached out a hand to stroke Morris – but the cat batted one paw at him, sinking its arched claws into the pads of his palm, like hooks, and gave a strange, yowling miaow.

  ‘Morris! Don’t be awful.’ Sylvia sat down in front of Simon, unhooking each claw. ‘Sorry. He’s my best friend. I love cats. I’d love a dog but that’s not really done in London. One day. Don’t you have any?’ She took the tiny cup from him.

  ‘No.’

  ‘Do you have any children?’

  ‘I’m not married. No nieces or nephews, either.’ He smiled, as she poured a tiny amount of tea into the cup and handed it back to him. ‘Thank you. What about you?’

  ‘I don’t have children,’ she said, laughing. ‘I’m twelve.’

  ‘I knew that – not that, I mean I knew you didn’t. I mean do you have brothers and sisters? Or cousins?’

  ‘No, it’s just me and my father. And Mummy has a sister. But she’s on Daddy’s side.’ She shrugged, and reticence forbade Simon from asking more.

  ‘What do you do all day?’

  ‘I go to school, silly. Over the river. But today I was off. I wasn’t feeling very well.’

  She lowered her face and he saw she was blushing.

  ‘I’m sorry to hear that. Are you all right now?’

  ‘It’s fine.’ Her face was bright red. ‘Just girls’ things really.’

  He was mystified. ‘Girls’ things?’ Then he was silent, they were both silent, utterly mortified.

  Morris distracted them by rolling over on the grass and stretching himself out. ‘Why did you call him Morris?’ he said.

  ‘I love William Morris. Well,’ she corrected herself. ‘I did. I’m mad about De Morgan now.’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘A designer.’ She smiled. ‘He built a house just down there actually, on the river. Mummy’s father knew him.’

  ‘Have you always lived here then?’

  ‘Mummy’s family always has. On Wellington Square. It’s changing now. It used to be very quiet. Like a village with lots of artists and so forth. But it’s different.’ She wrinkled her nose. ‘Daddy hates it. Mummy rather likes it. Me too.’

  ‘How?’

  ‘Oh, Bazaar, and the Fantasie Café and the boarding houses, and all that. There’s some fun to be had.’ She looked up at him with a heart-stopping smile. ‘I want to be a designer when I’m older, you know. I’m going to go to art college, and learn how to make prints. And do what I want. All the time.’

  Simon folded his arms. ‘Oh, really?’

  She met his smile. ‘Really. Have you always lived here, too?’

  ‘Since the war. I grew up in Sussex. And Egypt. And I was in Italy during the war.’

  ‘How wonderful, to have lived in so many places.’

  He found her enthusiasm infectious. ‘It was. It is. The attitudes. The ideas. No one’s . . . stuck.’

  ‘Where are you now?’

  ‘Now I’m in Hornsey.’

  ‘Horned-sea. I don’t know that bit.’

  He smiled. ‘I’d imagine if you’ve always lived in Chelsea you wouldn’t end up in Hornsey, though it’s a perfectly nice place to live. But I’m not staying there.’

  ‘Aren’t you? Where will you go?’

  He took a deep breath. ‘I’m not sure. But I won’t stay. I want to live by the sea one day. Kent, or, or – Sussex. The south coast.’ Images swam before his eyes – dying men, the smell of rotten bodies, rubbish, rubbish everywhere. He felt he shouldn’t be here any more. ‘Do you know it there?’

  ‘We used to go on holiday to Bexhill.’

  ‘Ah, then. Somewhere near there would do me. A little cottage with a shingle beach. A boat, so I can catch fish. And I’d have a shop.’

  A smile split her solemn face. ‘How exciting. With a bell over the door. Selling what?’

  It was like he was a child again, sitting on these small chairs, talking about what you wanted to do when you grew up. ‘Well . . . Gloves are my business. But I’d expand. Gloves, umbrellas, Burberrys, gumboots, you know the sort of thing. An emporium. I’d find a nice little high street in a seaside town. Retail is the thing, that’s what one keeps hearing. Something to keep me going for a time.’

  He stopped, remembering she was twelve, but Sylvia was resting her chin on her knees, hands clasped around her legs. ‘It sounds lovely. Freedom. All those lovely years to do what you want, just stretching ahead of you.’

  But Simon now dreaded the concept of time as an endless horizon, rolling out ahead of him. ‘Oh, I don’t know about that.’

  ‘I do. The days are long, but the years are short. My mother says that.’

  ‘Yes.’ Simon found himself staring at her, at her young face, unlined, at the blank expression in her eyes. ‘Yes, it’s true, I suppose.’

  There was a silence, and something passed between them. ‘I hate the sea,’ she said, lightly. ‘I hated those holidays. Water, no buildings, just horizon. And dead-eyed fish on the beaches, bodies and shipwrecks just out of sight. I want to live in London. All my life. I never want to leave.’

  He realised she had asked him all about himself, and he had asked nothing more about her. He was terrible at gleaning information; too British. He opened his mouth, but a telephone rang from inside the house, and instantly h
er expression changed.

  ‘I’m afraid you have to go,’ Sylvia said, flapping at him with her hands. She tugged frantically at the silk scarf around her head. Morris, sensing the change of mood, shot up onto the high brick wall at the side of the house, and then disappeared.‘Daddy said he’d call at four p.m. And he always knows if someone’s here. I’m sorry.’ She was moving towards the open French window. ‘He doesn’t like me to leave him waiting. Goodbye. Please come back? Please?’

  She was gone in an instant, shutting the door behind her. Simon climbed over the low front wall back onto the pavement, wondering if it had all been a dream.

  It was another two weeks before he saw her again. He’d thought of her every day since, but he always thought it odd when people used to say that as a marker of devotion. How many thoughts did one have in a day? Thousands, sometimes millions: far too many, anyway. It was natural he’d think of her, and that monstrously vast cat, the tea set and neat pencils, in that secret garden in the heart of Chelsea. The mysterious father ringing up. He wondered about her, about her mother. She needed someone to look out for her – could he help her? No, of course not. Couldn’t face it. Any of it! Intimacy, affection, bonds, love. Better to keep on walking.

  There was one day in early May when he had been turned down for a position at a glove shop in Jermyn Street, and another in Knightsbridge, Beauchamp Place. It was not the rejection he minded, it was the way they did it. ‘No, sir, I am afraid the position is no longer vacant,’ the manager in the second place had explained, flipping the ‘closed’ sign to ‘open’ with one practised flick of his own white-gloved finger.

  ‘But the notice is still up in the window.’

  ‘I have not yet had a chance to take it down. Good day to you.’

  ‘I’ll watch then, while you do,’ Simon had said, madly.

  The man had flared his nostrils, glaring at Simon. ‘I must ask you to leave, or I shall call the police.’

  ‘Call the fuzz then,’ said Simon. ‘I’ll wait. Just do the decent thing and tell me the truth. I’m not – Oh, hang it all. Good day,’ and he’d crammed his hat onto his head, sunk his fists into his capacious, grubby Burberry, and slunk down the street, towards the pub.

  But the Phene Arms – where he had taken to visiting since that day, as it made use of the hours to walk there and back – was dark, the door barred. ‘Bereavement. Closed until further notice,’ the sign in the window said.

  Simon stood still, not quite able to take this news in. The Phene was warm and welcoming, and there was always someone drunker there than he – an old geezer, or an artist, slumped at the bar, snoring loudly, and no one seemed to care. Little disappointments were unbearable to him at the moment. They suffused everything, seeming to be confirmation of the worst thoughts he had.

  He walked on up the road, away from the river and in a few minutes was on the King’s Road.

  His shoes were still damp from the rain and rubbed tightly; he was glad to sit down at the bar of the Chelsea Potter, take off his coat. He ordered a whisky and looked around; the place had just opened for the evening and was still quiet. Spring sunlight shone weakly in through the large windows. An old woman, head wrapped tightly in a scarf, peered in through the glass, her milky-blue eyes pointing in different directions, her wet mouth unresponsively slack; Simon jumped, and reared back, and she shuffled from side to side, but did not move. He drank the whisky as though he were thirsty, watching her. She swayed slightly.

  ‘She’s blind,’ a voice beside him said. ‘She’ll be off in a minute. Don’t worry about her.’

  He turned to see a woman sitting at the bar next to him. She raised her glass to him. She was elegant, in a way he couldn’t quite decode. Her clothes were plain: a little black velvet jacket and a grey wool skirt, but they were well-cut, perfectly so; Simon knew these things, just as he knew the skill it took to cut a piece of kid leather with shears. Around her neck was a jauntily tied black and white scarf. ‘She has a silver-topped walking stick,’ she told him. ‘And a niece waiting at home for her in Belgrave Square. Rich as Croesus. She just likes a stroll every afternoon.’

  She had thick black hair laced with white, in a crop; she tossed it defiantly, and smiled at him. A cameo brooch hung listlessly on the jacket, and little diamonds in her ears. She was not, he thought, more than forty. She offered him a cigarette from an engraved tin, flicking it open with the same certainty the proprietor of Loudon and Sons had turned the sign over, rejecting him.

  ‘Oh,’ said Simon, accepting it gratefully. She lit it with a flourish, then one for herself. There was something reckless about the way she moved. ‘Thank you very much. She startled me, that’s all.’

  ‘Have another drink,’ she said, eyeing him up. ‘Keep me company.’

  ‘Well,’ said Simon. ‘Perhaps I will.’

  He had never been one for picking up strange women, though he’d done it before, just not enjoyed it. It wasn’t for him. But there was something about this woman, her directness for one, that was entirely refreshing. ‘Another whisky?’ he said. ‘I’m Simon. Simon Lestrange.’

  ‘Gin and vermouth,’ she said, sliding the glass towards him. ‘I’m Hester, by the way.’

  ‘Hello, Hester Bytheway,’ he said, stupidly, and she laughed, and he realised and he laughed too, for the first time in weeks, the whisky flooding him with bonhomie. Who cared about losing one’s job, about the desperateness of life, about the things he saw at night when he closed his eyes, when there was this moment here, a woman laughing with him, a warm pub – he waved to the landlord, morosely polishing glasses by the bar hatch, for a refill.

  ‘Do you live around here?’ he asked.

  ‘Yes. I live and work here. Wellington Square.’ She jerked her head northwards. ‘You?’

  ‘Oh. Hornsey. North London.’

  Her generous mouth pouted; her heavy brows contracting into a frown. ‘I’ve never heard of Hornsey.’ She pronounced it Horned Sea, just like Sylvia had done. ‘Sounds marvellous. Forgive my ignorance. Bloomsbury’s about as far north as I go. Although I did visit a friend in Northumberland, before the war. Where is it?’

  ‘Hornsey’s north of Bloomsbury. Not as far as Northumberland, but getting there.’

  She shrugged. ‘Noted. And what do you do there, Mr Lestrange?’

  He told her about the gloves, and Peter Jones. He told her about looking for a job, and how he liked walking around London. And drawing, and everything else. She had large, bony fingers, and she slid them up and down the shiny pole of the bar whilst he was talking; it was hypnotic. She was, he knew, not sober. He wondered how often she was in there.

  ‘What about you,’ he said, eventually. ‘Am I allowed to ask what you do?’

  ‘Oh, this and that. I didn’t used to work before I was married. Now I have lodgers; the house is too big for just me. I cook and clean, and yell at them about gas. One of them changed the locks, I had to get the police in. So, there’s a room going, if you need it. Seven and six a month.’ She fluffed her hair.

  ‘Who are they, the lodgers?’

  ‘Oh, they’re not a bad bunch. Mr Thaddeus, he’s a bookkeeper, boils a lot of cabbage, and Dr Lovibond is a young historian, takes himself very seriously, rather in love with me. Liz, Mrs Krapolski, she’s a widow. She was married to a Polish engineer but she’s English in fact. She’s a reader for a publishing house. It sounds like a rather nice job; I keep thinking I should do something like that. This . . . It’s not much of a living, to be honest. But I have to work now, you see.’ She stubbed out her cigarette, finished her drink with that direct movement of hers, and signalled for another. ‘I have to keep the house.’

  All this varying information buzzed around Simon’s brain. He said, tentatively: ‘Your husband –’

  Her face contracted, her mouth became pinched. ‘Oh, God. Please let’s not talk about him. Or that little bitch he’s with. Please.’

  ‘I’m sorry.’ Simon retreated immediately, and rubbed one eye, trying
to maintain his composure. He considered himself adept at knowing how much to ask. It was unusual to get it this wrong.

  ‘Don’t worry. Who has time for another sob story?’ She gave him a smile that broke his heart; her large, mobile mouth stretching into a half-grimace. ‘My husband took our daughter, but left me with the house, and I’m stuck paying to keep it up and trying to clear out the bad tenants and get good ones, which is why I ask strange men in pubs for drinks, and all the while just down the road . . . he has Sylvia.’

  ‘Sylvia –’ Simon swallowed. A man sat down on the other side of her, and Hester turned almost angrily away from him, closer towards Simon.

  ‘My daughter. She’s twelve. I’m not allowed to see her. I’m a danger to her, you see.’

  ‘A – danger?’ Simon’s utter horror of sticking his nose in, the greatest offence, was fully awakened. He shifted on his stool.

  ‘Apparently, my dear. That’s Digby for you. He’s a monster. Devil in a bowler hat.’

  Simon was embarrassed. ‘Oh. I – I am sorry.’ He tried to get the conversation onto a more established footing. ‘How long have you been married?’

  ‘Thirteen years. I was eighteen, believe it or not.’

  ‘I don’t believe it, no,’ he said, hoping gallantry would save him. He desperately wanted to be able to say the right thing. ‘You must have been young when you became a mother.’

  ‘I was nineteen. Mummy was eighteen when she had me. Daddy believes one should start early. Not in Digby’s case. He was ancient when he married me. The first night . . . oh my God.’ She drained her glass, and placed it firmly, loudly, on the bar, and nodded for a refill. ‘Paunches and veins and dried skin everywhere. Disgusting. But – but, I was born to it.’ And she shrugged. ‘I was a deb. It’s a breeders’ market. Digby broke me in.’ She blinked, eyes fluttering shut for slightly too long. ‘But I wasn’t the right ride for him, so he got tired of me, and now he’s thrown me out to the knacker’s yard. He’s got his eye on a bishop’s daughter, would you believe it. One day you’ll hear I’ve been boiled down for glue.’ She took a sip of the new glass of gin and vermouth, looking at him over the cut glass, her thick black lashes trembling, and then she smiled. ‘Christ, that’s an awfully long metaphor, isn’t it? I don’t even like bloody horses. That was another thing wrong with me. Darling Alice did.’ Her large comical mouth turned down, and she was lost in thought.