He leant towards me now, patting my hand. ‘I’m a bad lad. I ran out on your mother, now I’m runnin’ out on another. I don’t seem to pick ’em right. Now if I’d met a lass like you when I was young…well now, things would have been different, wouldn’t they?’
I made no reply, my throat was full. Of all the people in the world, I loved George. He was all the fathers I had dreamed of; he was a protector; he was a knight in shining armour; he was the bulwark against all foes; as long as George was at hand, nothing much could go wrong for me. If anyone really got at me I could go to George and he would…settle their hash. That’s what he used to say during my schooldays: ‘You tell me if anybody gets at you in that school yard and I’ll go and settle their hash for them.’
‘Ah, don’t cry, pet; I’m not goin’ to the ends of the earth. Look, I’ll send you postcards, naughty ones with big fat women on.’ He pulled his chair closer to mine and put his arm around my shoulder, and I leant my head on his chest. He smelt nice tonight, soapy nice. But I noticed through my blinking tear-filled eyes that the bulge of his stomach was getting bigger. That was his beer drinking, added to which he was always eating chocolate. He said it helped to keep his strength up on the long runs. We sat quiet for a time; then he said, ‘You still all right for money?’
‘Oh yes.’ I lifted my head and nodded at him. I was slightly puzzled. Then I said, ‘I still feel that you should have had it.’
‘Oh, no, no. She knew what she was doing all right.’ He pursed his lips. ‘And she was right, she put it in hard writing that you had to have everything.’
‘But you should have had something. You could have claimed.’
‘I could have claimed nowt, lass. Well, I would have had to get a solicitor and by the time the case had gone through, he would have had the bulk of it. Anyway, I didn’t want a penny of hers; I didn’t feel I was entitled to it; and it was a mistake from the beginnin’. You were the only good thing that came out of it.’
‘Oh George. Look, will…will you let me…?’
‘No, no, not a dime. No, thank you, lass. Anyway, with the money I’ve been makin’ lately I’m in clover. And the old dragon’s kept half of it for me.’ He patted his chest pocket. ‘Me wallet’s bulgin’ an’ I’m gona take care of it till I get set on somewhere. Oh, I’m gona be a reformed man, you’ll see.’
I was still puzzled that he had asked me if I was all right for money. My mother had left four thousand, three hundred and fifty pounds, besides the house and the furniture. Part of the money came through an insurance. George knew how much I had and he would know too that it would be impossible for me the way I lived to spend that money in so short a time. Anyway, I expected it to last me for years, even if I didn’t earn anything. And then he gave me the answer, ‘Don’t mind me saying this, pet,’ he said, ‘but those two along the street, the Stickles, have they ever asked you for a loan or anything like that?’
‘No, no, George. Gran asked me much the same question. What makes you think they would?’
‘Oh, I don’t know. To my mind they’re a queer couple.’
My voice was very low as I said, ‘They’ve been very kind to me, George. I know they are not like you and Gran. I don’t get on with them like that, I…I feel awkward with them, but they’ve still been very kind, more so than anybody in the terrace. Do you know Katie Moore who I used to be so friendly with? She’s married now, but she passed me in the street the other day as if she didn’t know me; and her mother merely nods at me. Yet at one time I was always going in and out of their house. She…she was the only girlfriend that I ever had. And those next door, the Nelsons and the McVities, they hardly speak.’
‘Oh, well, both of them are stiff-necks.’ He laughed now, saying, ‘Remember the time when McVitie’s terrier jumped the wall and cocked his leg on Oswald, you remember that day?’
I did not smile or laugh for I did remember that day. My mother had picked Oswald up by the few hairs left on his cloth ear and, taking him into the kitchen, had lifted the boiler top and thrust him into the fire. George seemed to have forgotten the result of that incident. I had been almost dumb with sorrow for a week. And George had said, ‘Well, now, she couldn’t have done anything else, not after the dog had widdled on it. Now could she?’
I remember my reply to this: ‘He could have been washed, and…and he looked like you,’ and the great roar he had let out. He had, I remember, bought me another bear, but it was never Oswald. I don’t know what happened to it.
At the front door he stopped and kissed me, not on the cheek but on the mouth. It had the most strange effect upon me and I clung to him, crying, ‘George. George.’ He had to push me from him back into the hall; then he went out, pulling the door closed behind him …
The other thing that occurred that week was May almost bursting in the back door one evening when I was preparing my meal, and her first words were, ‘Sardines on toast again! You know this will never do; you must cook yourself a meal…or let me come and do it for you.’ This was the first time she had made such a suggestion, and she went on, ‘I’ll give you lessons, for there’s no doubt you need them.’ She laughed her exposed gum laugh. And then she told me the reason for her hurried visit. ‘Howard has broken off his engagement,’ she said. ‘You have no idea of my relief. She was so unsuitable; she was a person who would never have learned. As I told you, common wasn’t the name for it. I was surprised he couldn’t see it himself. But at last, fortunately, oh yes, fortunately, it has got through to him.’ And then she added, ‘Oh, you are pleased an’ all. Howard’s very fond of you, you know, very fond.’
Was he? I hadn’t noticed. He was polite to me. And was I looking pleased? I always used to think he was still serving customers after the shop had closed. Or perhaps it was just his height that made him bend slightly forward when he was talking to me. And sometimes he would raise his hands to his shoulders as if he was putting on an imaginary scarf. I was to learn he was adjusting his tape measure …
It was about a week later that I went to dinner at the Stickles’. Up till then I had never been further into their house than the hallway. But here I was, sitting in their dining room and, to use May’s own expression when speaking of most things and of people outside the house, the furniture looked common. It was what you would see in any of the shops on the main street that were always having sales. However, what the room lacked in refinement the meal made up for it.
I really did enjoy the meal. I couldn’t say as much for the conversation that took place afterwards in the sitting room, which by the way, like the dining room, was very poorly furnished. Sitting there looking about me, I could understand why May considered our house…my house as I thought of it now, was so nice, because it was a palace compared with this.
The conversation ranged around Howard’s hobby which was collecting bottles. May enthused wildly about it. Howard had little to say until May said, ‘Take her up and show her your collection, Howard.’ Then he looked at her and said, ‘Oh, she wouldn’t be interested in bottles.’ Then he turned his head and looked at me and ended with, ‘Would you?’
‘Oh, yes. Yes?’—I made my voice eager—‘I would very much like to see them. I’ve heard about people collecting bottles.’
For the first time I saw a look of bright animation in his face; my reply seemed to have changed him altogether, because, getting up quickly, he said, ‘Come along then. Come along.’ And I followed him up the stairs and into a room that was the same size as my bedroom. When he switched the light on there I saw the bottles for the first time. There were hundreds of them, arrayed on shelves all round the room, with more on a long narrow bench running under the window and even more on the floor.
I stood and gaped and said truthfully, ‘I’ve never seen so many different bottles in my life.’
‘They are lovely, aren’t they?’
Like a man showing off some precious possession, he lifted a bottle from a shelf. It was square. It had a glass stopper and I watched hi
s fingers stroking the glass as if it were the most delicate porcelain. ‘This is my favourite,’ he said. Then he pursed his small mouth and wagged his head and added, ‘But I really haven’t got any favourites. She’s lovely though, isn’t she?’ At this instant Hamilton peered over his shoulder and, his nose on the bottle, he turned his eyes towards me and there was a deep enquiry in them. He was asking the same question as I was: Are there male and female bottles?
‘Oh.’ Howard had noticed my glance was directed upwards. ‘Oh, you’ve got your eye on Bluey, have you?’ he said. And reaching up, he took down from a shelf a large blue bottle with a glass stopper; then holding it out towards me, he said, ‘He’s an old chemist’s receptacle. I have a few dozen of his cousins.’
Hamilton’s head was at the other side of him now peering down on the bottle, one eye seeming to look at the bottle, the other eye turned in my direction: So they are male and female, he said. Not only that, there’s families. My, my! What have we here?
‘This’—Howard lifted another bottle from the shelf—‘saucy thing has the maker’s name in the glass. Look.’ He held it out towards me, saying, ‘Middle of last century, and she was a sauce bottle. Indeed, indeed, yes.’
One thing that was revealed to me before we finally left the bottle room was that Howard Stickle was a different man when he was with his bottles: the shopwalker had disappeared; the assistant manager of Hempies’ the high class tailor was lost under myriad pieces of glass and stone. Oh yes, there were stone bottles too, all shapes and sizes. Those on the table were ready for classification he informed me. The ones under needed to be washed and dressed, his own words, before they found their everlasting home on one of the shelves …
‘There! What do you think?’ May greeted us in the sitting room sometime later. And I said, ‘It’s most interesting. Unbelievable how many bottles there are about; I’m really surprised.’ But if I’d been truthful, my surprise, I would have added, was not so much about the number of different bottles, but with the discovery that Howard Stickle was just an ordinary fellow, and not someone superior who had once played tennis in Gosforth …
That evening was the beginning of a number of meals in their house and of an equal number in my own. Prior to the latter, May would come and supposedly show me how to prepare the meal while doing it mostly herself. There was one thing about May, she knew how to cook.
So things went on smoothly, progressing, I should say, as May intended for some months.
During this time I received a number of cards and one letter from George and generally showing different postmarks. The letter said he was enjoying himself, meeting different kinds of people that he never knew existed, and that the south wasn’t as black as it was painted. No, not by a long chalk: there were some decent fellows down there…and lasses an’ all.
Gran missed her Georgie, mostly, she admitted, last thing at night before she went to bed because she had always waited up for him no matter how late he might come in, except, of course, when he was on the long lorry journeys. But she kept herself going all right during the day for she had a part-time job in a factory now, packing dresses.
I, too, managed to keep busy during the week but I hated Sundays. Sundays were interminable. I had discovered long ago that no matter what you did you couldn’t change a Sunday. You could alter your pattern, go someplace, or stay at home, even be sick in bed, but you still knew it was Sunday. I always had the longing to talk to somebody on a Sunday: strangers in the park even; or to go and knock on May’s door. And I might have done if it hadn’t been for Hamilton; he was very attentive on Sundays …
The first invitation to go out with Howard came one evening in May. I had been to supper with them and he was walking me back to my door, and he looked out over the playing field towards the park and said, ‘It’s a lovely evening. May is a lovely month, a quiet month, it has so much promise.’
He sounded so poetic that I stood looking up at him, and as I did so, Mrs McVitie passed us and Howard raised his hat to her. He always wore a hat even on a short journey. ‘Good evening, Mrs McVitie,’ he said, and she mumbled something and went into her gate.
We then walked on and he said, ‘May, as you can imagine, was born in this month. It’s her birthday next Wednesday. I really don’t know what to get her. Perhaps you would come and help me choose something?’
I was staggered by the invitation, and I must have appeared so because he hesitated in his step and, looking down at me, said, ‘You will be too busy?’
‘Oh, no, no.’ My voice was two tones higher than usual. ‘I would love…I mean I would like very much to come and help you choose a present. And I must get her something too.’
He was standing at my door now as he said, ‘It would be nice to end her birthday at a play or something. They are putting on H.M.S. Pinafore in the Town Hall on that particular evening, it should so happen. Would…would you like to come too?’
‘Yes; thank you very much. Yes, I would.’
I’d never been to a place of entertainment with a man in my life before. I’d never even been to the pictures with George. I thought the suggestion wonderful.
‘Well, that’s settled then. Now I must away because tempus fugit.’ Oh, that saying! How I came to loathe it. Tempus fugit, time flies. When years later I told Gran about it, she said, ‘Oh, that’s an old one: tempus fugit, said the man as he threw the clock at his wife.’
Nevertheless I thoroughly enjoyed that evening out; it was my first taste of Gilbert and Sullivan. The following day as I dusted, I skipped from one room to the other singing snatches of the songs.
This night out began a pattern of evenings out. At first May accompanied us; then one night—we had made arrangements to go to the pictures—she had a severe cold and insisted that Howard and I went alone. I must admit that I felt rather proud of being escorted to the pictures by this tall presentable man.
It was on a night in late August that Howard proposed to me. We had again been to the pictures and for the first time as we sat in the dark he had taken hold of my hand, and there flowed out from me to him a great wave of gratitude. That this man could find it in his heart to make this gesture towards me was so overwhelming that the tears poured silently down my cheeks. It happened to be a very sentimental picture, and when it was finished he chided me playfully about my concern for the heroine.
Later at home, I had just made some coffee and we were in the sitting room. The electric logs were glowing and the pink shade on the standard lamp was adding to the warm radiance when once again he took my hand and this time said, ‘Do I have to tell you, Maisie, that I’ve become very fond of you?’
I was about to say, thank you very much, Howard, but I remained quiet, staring at him.
‘You know I had a broken love affair some time ago?’
‘Yes, Howard. I was very sorry about it.’
‘You needn’t be.’ He pressed my hand. ‘I’ve got over that, entirely over it, and I know now it was a great mistake in asking that certain person to be my wife. But I also know now’—I watched his Adam’s apple flicking up and down, as I imagined, with emotion—‘that I’m making no mistake in saying to you, Maisie: Would you consider being my wife?’
I stared up into his face. There were small beads of sweat on his brow. That I was amazed by this offer was putting it mildly; yet at the same time I asked myself why I should be, because hadn’t he in a way been courting me? But how silly. Just because he had taken me to the pictures once or twice and we had been to see some amateur theatricals, sometimes accompanied by May, was that a sign of courtship? From my point of view, they had both been kind to the extent of taking pity on me. But here he was, this presentable man, asking me to be his wife. Never in my wildest dreams had I expected to be married. I had thought the only romance that would come my way would be through the written word: once I began a love story I couldn’t put it down, eager to know the heroine’s desires, the fulfilment of her longings, the overcoming of her frustrations. And if the
writer should explain that the heroine was no beauty I would glow as she did when at last the proposal came.
And now here was the proposal and I wanted to glow. I should be glowing, but there he was, that Hamilton with forefoot raised ready to kick Howard in the back of the front. In order to do that he would have had to bring his hoof underneath the couch; but Hamilton could do that. Hamilton was capable of doing anything disturbing.
From the back door of my mind I yelled at him, ‘Go away! I shall never get this chance again. All right, if it is a mistake I’ve got to make it. Who else do you know will ask me to marry him? Look at me.’
‘What did you say, dear?’
He called me dear, and I said, ‘Look at me. Well I suppose you don’t really need to, you’ve already done so, but have you taken into account my arm?’ I lifted up my shorter arm and then went on, ‘And what is more, I’m a very plain person. I…I mean my features, and they are not likely to improve.’
‘Oh, my dear, my dear’—he had a hold of both my hands now—‘your humility does you credit.’
Yes, he had a way of talking like that. I wasn’t taken very much with it, but nevertheless at this moment I lapped it up.
‘Plain women,’ he said, ‘are often the most interesting; and after all, beauty is only skin deep. There is a beautiful woman asleep in every plain one. And what’s more, plain women are known to make lifelong companions, and that’s what the partnership of marriage is all about to my way of thinking, companionship. What do you say, Maisie?’
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