Authors: Monica Dickens
Josephine was naturally athletic and soon fulfilled Commander Moore’s prophecy six years ago in Ladbroke Square, by developing an ‘eye’. To explain to the incredulous games mistress that, at the age of thirteen, she had never learned to play any games more team-spirited than hopscotch, she had invented a long and crippling illness.
‘I wasn’t allowed to play netball,’ she would say, ‘because of the rheumatic fever.’
The myth was also useful to explain away the staggering gaps in Mrs Mortimer’s education. ‘I never learned about decimals; they did it when I had the rheumatic fever.’ Mrs Mortimer’s daughter had skated over the coarser characters of history, so it
was: ‘I missed Henry the Eighth, I’m afraid, when I was poorly.’
But Jo was intelligent and ambitious, and with a little extra coaching from mistresses who liked her bright, responsive ways, she soon caught up. Mr Abinger could not help being pleased with her first year’s report. Her attainments made him almost forget that she was not his own child.
‘Takes after her Dad,’ he said, wagging his head and sitting down on the stool behind the counter to browse over the report. ‘“Has worked very well … hm, hm…. Neat, intelligent work. Examination results commendable,” Hm, just like her Dad. Though mind you – ’ he pointed a finger at his wife and daughter, who were carrying on with the work of clearing up the shop, which he had abandoned – ‘I was never anything but first in mathematics. There wasn’t a boy could beat me at figures.’
‘Can I have some money for my report, Dad?’ Josephine leaned on the broom, watching his tractable face.
‘Money?’ His face jibbed at once. The lines dropped downwards to the heavy jaw. His skin seemed even to take on a leaden hue. ‘What mercenary ideas are you getting now?’
‘All the other girls get money for a good report, Dad,’ she said, looking at him less hopefully.
‘All the other girls have not got sensible fathers then. I don’t hold with bribery. I was going to suggest – ’his face lightened at the thought of his own generosity – ‘I was going to suggest taking you on the river, Saturday. Shut the shop for the afternoon and take you and Mum off on a little steamer trip as a reward for not doing
quite
as badly at your lessons as I expected.’
‘Don’t tease her, George.’ Mrs Abinger laughed quickly, in case his last remark were not meant as a joke. ‘But a river trip – well!’ she clasped her hands. ‘What do you say, Jo?
Well,
George! But what about your bowls practice? Should we get back in time for that?’
‘We-ell – ’ he leaned back against the tinned soups and gravy powders. ‘I daresay the heavens wouldn’t fall if I missed it just once, as it’s a special occasion.’
To Mrs Abinger’s horror, Jo did not appreciate this concession.
‘It’s ever so kind of you, Dad,’ she said quite casually,
sweeping the floor, ‘but I’m afraid I couldn’t – not Saturday. There’s a school match, and Miss Laycock said we could all come and watch. She might even let me help score. If Myrtle Gardner makes more than twenty, Saturday, her average – ’
‘Myrtle Gardner.’ Mr Abinger lowered the front legs of the stool, and stood up. ‘If I hear one word more about Myrtle Gardner, I shall go stark, raving mad,’ he said, and moved towards the back-room with a kind of defeated shamble, his long stiff apron standing out as if he were a doll in a cardboard box.
Mrs Abinger let out her breath in relief at the moderation of his tone. She had thought he would be very angry. But he was not angry, he was hurt. He was not often hurt; he was usually too obtuse to notice if he was slighted. He had had no practice in being hurt. He did not know how to behave. That was why he had gone away.
The summer holidays provided a blessed respite from Myrtle Gardner, once the point had been established that she had gone to Shanklin, Isle of Wight.
Josephine was bored during the holidays. The High School girls came from all over London, and none of her friends lived near. She and Violet, who was growing into a pinch-faced, precocious adolescent, had never had much in common. They were further divided now by things like games and gym and swimming, of which Violet at her school knew nothing and affected to care less.
Violet wanted to powder her nose and put a ribbon in her hair and mince up and down Praed Street in the hope of speaking to boys. But Jo could not walk down Praed or any other street without bowling frantically all the way. She did not want to speak to boys. She wanted to play cricket.
She had not spoken to the Moores since her disgrace. She had seen them sometimes by chance, and bolted out of sight, but now she hung round the railings of Ladbroke Square in the hope of seeing them playing inside. She even dared to loiter outside their front gate, until Nanny, who was caretaking, came out and told her to go away; there was no one at home. They had all gone abroad.
For want of anything else to do, Jo helped in the shop. Mrs Abinger was ecstatic at the speed with which she could give change, and often asked her to reckon up a customer’s bill for her, to show off how airily Jo could deal with posers like two-and-three-quarter pounds of Danish collar at one and a penny three the pound.
To Josephine, the holidays were only an interim to be lived through until school started again. She was lackadaisical and disgruntled with her parents and the shop and the flat and the Portobello Road, which stewed in the heat, simmering with the stale smells of the back end of August.
In September, when the Portobello Road began to smell of apples, and great masses of Michaelmas daisies blew on the stalls, Jo began to be more cheerful. In her eye appeared the light which heralded some such remarks as: ‘I wonder if Myrtle Gardner played cricket in the Isle of Wight,’ or ‘Myrtle Gardner will be a prefect next term, you know.’
When Jo came home after the first day of term, with a sparkle and an appetite for tea she had not shown for weeks, Mr Abinger lowered the paper resignedly.
‘Well,’ he said, ‘tell us how you found the famous Myrtle Gardner. We might as well get it over first as last and enjoy our tea in peace. Go on. How many runs did she bowl?’ It was one of his jokes to pretend not to know the most elementary facts about cricket.’
‘Oh Dad!’ Josephine laughed, and fiddled with her hair, which for some reason she had scraped back into a plait before she sat down to tea. ‘You are silly. We play netball in the winter, not cricket.’
‘All right, all right,’ he sighed. ‘Tell us how many balls Myrtle Gardner netted then, and get it over.’
‘Myrtle Gardner … ’ said Jo vaguely, as if she had never heard of her. ‘No, but I want to tell you, I’ve been moved up to another class and I – ’
‘Isn’t that splendid?’ cried Mrs Abinger, who did not know that the girls went up automatically every year. ‘Well done our Jo. You’ll be doing more difficult work than ever now, I suppose.’
But Jo was not interested in the work. The light was in her eye. ‘I sit next to a girl,’ she said, her voice vibrating a little, ‘called Pauline Gray. She’s going to be my best friend. We sat next to each other at dinner, and we’re going to walk round the playground together every day, and talk in code signs, so people can’t know what we say.’
‘It all sounds so exciting,’ said Mr Abinger heavily, ‘that I can hardly bear to hear any more.’
‘She lives at Wimbledon,’ Jo told him confidently, ‘and comes up on the District every morning, with a season ticket.’ She sat back and tore off a great mouthful of bread and butter with the satisfied air of one who has announced great tidings.
‘And I suppose,’ said her father, staring at her hair, ‘she wears a pigtail?’
‘Yes, she does,’ said Jo airily. ‘It’s ever so thick – like a rope. She plays the piano. Mum, can I learn the piano? It’s only two pound extra a term. I asked.’
Mrs Abinger frowned at her and shook her head, as much as to say: Not now. ‘We’ll have to think about that,’ she said cautiously. George’s face behind the paper was sphinx-like. If she did scrape the money together, and she had already decided that of course she would, she might manage to keep it from him.
‘Pauline Gray has two lessons a week, and a piano at home to practise on.’ Jo sighed happily. ‘She’s going to take me home to tea. Pauline Gray, her name is.’
All that term, and the next spring term, it was Pauline Gray, Pauline Gray, nothing but Pauline Gray, until Mr Abinger was driven to say: ‘Why don’t you bring her home and let’s have a look at her?’ He would settle Miss Pauline Gray with her piano playing and her cocker spaniel and her accordion-pleated tartan skirt.
Josephine never brought her friend home, although she often went to tea at Wimbledon after school, and sometimes set off on the District, as on a magic carpet, on Saturdays and Sundays as well.
Easter that year was hot, and Mrs Abinger’s blood pressure mounted. She no longer popped up and down between the shop and the flat. She climbed slowly, pulling on the banisters, and
descended flat-foot and flushed, saying: ‘Those stairs will be the death of me.
‘Ah, there you are at last, Ellie,’ said Miss Loscoe, who had been waiting a long time for George to finish erecting a pyramid of cocoa tins and serve her.
‘Sorry to keep you waiting, Dot. I just had to put my greens on.’
‘Why don’t you do everything up there at the same time, instead of jack-in-the-boxing up and down all day long?’
‘George likes his vegetables done at the last minute,’ said Mrs Abinger. ‘He won’t stand for things kept hot.’
‘That’s right.’ Mr Abinger came out of the window backwards. ‘Twelve minutes at the boil, drain and serve at once.’ He never did any cooking, but he knew all the theory.
‘I don’t know about that, seeing that I never touch greens myself,’ said Miss Loscoe, as if to condemn those who did. ‘I’m funny in that I don’t fancy what I might find in them.’
‘You don’t eat enough, I’m sure,’ ventured Mrs Abinger. ‘I’ve got such a nice ham out there. I wish you’d let me give you a bit for boiling. As a present, mind – just between friends.’
It was a mistake. Miss Loscoe drew herself up, her mouth a drawstring purse too full of teeth. ‘Thank you very much, Ellie,’ she said ironically, ‘but when I require charity, I’ll let you know.’
Mrs Abinger changed the subject. ‘How’s your mother then? Poor soul,’ she added, for Mrs Loscoe was dying.
‘I was up at the hospital yesterday,’ said Miss Loscoe. ‘It’s quite a convenient bus ride. There’s a stop just beyond the Scrubs prison.’ Even after six years, she could not help mentioning this in a meaning way. ‘She didn’t seem any brighter,’ she continued in the dragging moan she used for talking about illness. ‘She knew me, the Sister said – she’s a very know-all is that Sister – but she wasn’t able to do more than wander in her speech. I don’t fancy going on visiting days. People stare so.’
‘They won’t let you go any other time though, will they?’
‘Not until it’s a question of the End. Then they send for you, day or night, and put up screens. My sister says they give you quite a lovely death in hospital. When she was a night nurse, she
used to give tea to the whole ward when anyone passed over. Which reminds me of what I came in for. I’ll take a quarter of the small leaf, please, Ellie.’
‘I haven’t had time to open the new case yet,’ said Mrs Abinger. ‘Why don’t you take a pound packet, to save you waiting?’
‘I said a quarter, thank you.’ Pinching in the sides of her pale nose, Miss Loscoe looked as if she too ought to be behind screens in Ducane Road Hospital. ‘That’s too much for you, Ellie,’ she said, watching Mrs Abinger struggling with the big carton, without offering to help. ‘Where’s Josephine then, that she isn’t here helping you in the holidays?’
‘Ah, where indeed?’ put in Mr Abinger. ‘Where but at Wimbledon?’
‘Again?’
Miss Loscoe’s eyebrows rose into circumflex accents. ‘She seems very thick with these Bays or Mays or Grays. You want to be careful, Ellie, that it doesn’t lead to trouble, like ahem.’ Although she pursed her lips on what was in her mind, it was as clear as if a family group of the Moores were mirrored in each eye.
‘Don’t you worry about Jo,’ said Mrs Abinger, red in the face from struggling either with anger or the case of tea. ‘The Grays think a lot of Jo and I like her to go there whenever she can. It does her good to get out into the country air.’
To Josephine, who had never had a proper holiday, Wimbledon was the country. One evening at the beginning of the summer term, as she and Pauline walked from the station through the amiable little roads with their cherry blossom and bright hedges, it occurred to her that there was not a single tree or bush or even a blade of grass in the whole of the Portobello Road.
The Grays lived in a flimsy, semi-detached house with a rockery and a stone gnome and a paling fence topped by clipped privet. Their gate was cut out in the pattern of a rising sun, as were the gates of the houses all down the road, with the sun on alternate sides. The Grays’ gate said SHERINGHAM, which was where they had lived before they came to Wimbledon. As they went through, Jo reached up to touch the laburnum, which was just breaking into frail flower. Because she had never been told
it was suburban, she gave it all the admiration mimosa gets through being indigenous to the Mediterranean.
‘I do wish we lived out here,’ she said.
‘That’s the; worst of your father having his own business,’ said Pauline, who had been allowed to imagine the Corner Stores as something a trifle smaller than Selfridges. ‘He can’t leave it every day like Daddy leaves the Bank of England.’
They rang the bell, which buzzed on the inside of the door, and waited in the porch. The Grays never went in and out by the back door. The air was fresh and there was no noise in the hill road but evening birds and schoolchildren going home to tea.
‘You are lucky, Paw,’ said Josephine.
She did not only mean lucky to live in Wimbledon. She envied the whole secure atmosphere of the Grays’ home. The Grays wanted no more than they had got. They were self-sufficient, contented to the point of complacency.
They all had harmless faces, neat, sexless figures, and tidy, uneventful clothes. They all liked each other and were polite at meals as a matter of course. The children did not have to be told to wash their hands. They liked washing their hands.