Authors: Monica Dickens
Although they were completely different in appearance, speech, and habits from the casual, noisy Moores, it was the same quality in both families which attracted Josephine. It was that security within the family; a homespun satisfaction that made them sure their way of life was the right one. There was no restless striving, no crying for the moon, no screaming nerves. Family quarrels were only parochial bickerings. The Moores squabbled the whole time, the Grays hardly ever; but neither of them ever clashed in those bitter, alienating conflicts which, although patched up, leave their mark like a tubercle scar on an outwardly healthy lung.
Away from home, they wore its influence like an armour against the tilts of the world, unheld its customs, and returned as surely as pigeons to a loft. Happy families, and fascinating to Josephine.
It was partly this that had also drawn her to the Goldners. Even they had that family solidarity which accepted as right
their pigsty home and their mother’s shrill abuse and their father’s strap ends, and had sent them single-mindedly to his rescue.
It was this that had attracted Jo to Pauline. It was an unlikely friendship. Pauline was a High School mediocrity, one of those who neither fail examinations nor get honours, who play wing half at hockey and go in ninth at cricket and scrape over the vaulting horse just well enough not to be made to do it again. She was quite happy about it all. Nothing at school could affect her because she was a Gray, and would be going home to ‘Sher-ingham’ at half-past four.
Jo, with her strivings and emulations and hero-wdrship, her tolerance of home only as a limbo between one school day and the next, had been tantalized by this unambitious confidence even on that first day when she had found Pauline sitting with a smooth brow at the next desk. When she first went to ‘Sheringham’ she had felt, as every time since when the door clicked back on the tiny hall’s uncritical welcome, the security of a deep hot bath in mid-winter. Everything is all right. You can relax until it is time to get out.
A shadow grew beyond the stained-glass panel. The front door clicked open, and there was Mrs Gray, as stock-size in face and figure as a draper’s model. Each ridge of her short brown hair was in its place, and her fawn dress differed from her others only in colour. All her dresses had little touches of white at the neck; a collar or a bow or a lace modesty front pinned with gilt pins.
She had been in the kitchen making scones, but she never went to the front door in her apron. She gave each of the girls a cool dry kiss and they hung up their hats and coats. Jo’s coat loop was broken again. Pauline’s never was.
‘Where were you in class, Paulie?’ her mother asked, as it was Monday.
‘Twelfth,’ said Pauline.
‘That’s right, dear.’ Pauline was always about twelfth out of twenty. Josephine was usually in red ink near the top, unless her head had been bad, when she was spectacularly near the bottom.
The Grays never washed in the scullery sink. The girls went up to the bathroom, where there were four toothbrushes in a rack, four flannels on hooks, and four towels folded on the hot pipes. Mr Gray’s shaving tackle was out of sight, and if anyone in that well-run family needed laxatives, those were out of sight too.
Pauline’s bedroom was not much bigger than Josephine’s but it was distempered in pale green with a frieze of hollyhocks. Her chintz bedspread matched the curtains and she had a little desk with a row of suitable books between spaniel book-ends. Outside the window was a lawn with a birdbath and flowerbeds bordered with pebbles, and beyond that, the green expanse of Wimbledon Park, where Mr Gray played golf on Sundays.
Pauline looked in the mirror at her face, which was rather flat, like a plate. She combed her front hair and shook her plait, which went flop, heavily, down the middle of her back. The weight of it made her hold her head erect and stick out her well-developed chest.
‘I wish I was pretty like you,’ she said without rancour.
‘Me? I’m not pretty, you ass,’ said Jo, although she knew she was. She knew she could look very pretty sometimes, like last Christmas when Uncle Reg, smelling of beer, had behaved so oddly in the passage. She knew that she could also look very plain when she did not feel well and her hair drooped streakily, and the sparkle went out of her eyes, and the lids looked bruised. Pauline always looked the same, even when her glands came up, and she sat up in the bed with a muffler round her neck and was allowed to have her dog in the bedroom for a treat.
Her cocker spaniel, who was called Darkie, had a basket in the kitchen and was not allowed on the furniture or near the table at mealtimes. Everything in the house was highly polished and the ornaments were always in exactly the same place, although if you lifted them, there would be no mark underneath.
They had tea in the lounge, which was what they called the sitting-room. Pauline’s younger brother Peter, who had choirboy eyes and a completely round head like a black snooker ball, took plain bread and butter first without being told.
At the Moores’, the jam had always been in its pot, and everyone dipped in their knives, because Nanny could not see and
Mrs Moore had long ago tired of rebuking them. At the Grays’, the jam was in an electro-plated jar with a bracket for the spoon, which Mrs Gray had got with coupons from packets of tea. At the Moores, there had cither been something exciting like icecream and strawberries or meringues, or nothing at all except bread and dripping. Mrs Gray’s teas were always exactly the same; day-old bread cut too thinly for schoolchildren, cakes always bought from the same shop, and her scones neat but overcooked.
Nobody ate a lot. Jo always felt very hungry for supper when she had been at Wimbledon. It was the only thing that reconciled her to going back to the flat. At tea, they made cordial conversation about what they had done all day, and then Mr Gray arrived and was kissed on his cheek, which had managed to remain as smooth as when he had just used his unseen razor.
There was some more cordial conversation about what Mr Gray had done at the Bank of England. ‘I had lunch with old Webb,’ he said. ‘He told me all about his caravanning spree with Muriel.’
‘How nice dear.’ Mrs Gray did not ask him what he had had for lunch. The Grays never talked about food.
After tea, Mr Gray, who never did his correspondence in the Bank of England’s time, went to his den to write letters. He was a sandy-haired man with many moles on his face and a solid figure that looked right in city clothes and right in the plus fours and green stockings he wore on Sundays.
‘I’m going to write to Seacombe,’ he said, ‘to confirm the bookings we made last year.’ They went every year to the same place on the Devon coast, and the photographs in their albums were labelled ‘Our cove’, ‘Our fisherman’, ‘Our rock’, ‘Our shrimping pool’.
‘Where’s Jo going for the holidays?’ asked Mrs Gray.
‘I don’t know,’ Josephine said. The Abingers could never go away because of the shop, but the Grays did not know that there were not managers and ‘assistants’, which was Jo’s glorified description of the feeble man who was now their errand boy and fell off his bicycle going round corners because he had been shell-shocked in the war.
‘I wish you could come to Seacombe,’ said Pauline. ‘Wouldn’t it be nice, Mums, if the Abingers could come to Seacombe, and we could join up for picnics and things?’
‘Jolly topping idea,’ said her father, who had a schoolboy vocabulary and preferred ginger pop to beer. ‘I’ll give you the address of our hotel.’
Josephine put the piece of paper in her tunic pocket carefully as if there was any hope of Mr Abinger even listening to the suggestion.
After tea, the girls helped Mrs Gray to wash up in the kitchen where everything was kept in its labelled jar, and the tea cloths were washed through every day. Then they played a gentle game with a tennis racket and a soft ball in the garden with Peter. Then they played the piano in the lounge, while Mrs Gray, who was musical and had played at charity concerts in her day, sat with her mending, keeping time with one foot, and clapping her hands with high little screams in quite a continental, artistic way if they played a wrong note.
Pauline played through her exercises before she played her piece, which was still
Marche Militaire.
She had been doing it for nearly two terms. She sat very straight with her plait dead centre down her spine, thumping
one
two three,
one
two three,
one
two three
one,
as if she were accompanying a dancing class. Jo dashed straight into her piece, which she played with a flash-in-the-pan mixture of brilliance and bungling which was the despair of the music mistress.
When it was time for her to go home, she kissed Mrs Gray, and kissed Peter, who was bathing himself with a lot of toy boats and no splashing. She did not say good-bye to Mr Gray. Daddy must never be disturbed in his den, although he would not have minded; he was always ready to talk to anybody, even at breakfast.
In spite of what she said to Miss Loscoe, Mrs Abinger sometimes wondered whether the Grays liked Jo to go there so often. It had never occurred to them, however, to wonder whether they minded or not. They liked nearly everybody; they were not
impatient enough to be bored by people. If they did not like anyone particularly, they simply waited until it was time for them to go. Josephine did not disturb them in any way, for when she was at Wimbledon, her more turbulent nature was subdued to their level, and she behaved as they did.
Why she liked going there so much was a phenomenon which, in later years, she could never understand. For the Grays must surely have been one of the dullest families in the British Isles.
When she had been to Wimbledon with its lilac and laburnum, where the trains ran overground as if they could not bear to miss the scented air, Notting Hill Gate station seemed more sooty and penitential than ever. The Portobello Road seemed slummier, the shop front shabbier; smaller and more futile the sleeping, shuttered shop, which would wake to-morrow and tomorrow and to-morrow to the same old round of weighing and wrapping up and ringing up the till. Going through the back store, Jo was more conscious of the smell of bacon and cheese and the piece of liver sausage which had gone bad somewhere but could not be located.
She wished her father would stop talking about relaying the staircase linoleum, and
do
it. She knew what she would see when she opened the door of the sitting-room. Her father in the arm-chair, reading the paper censoriously, his trousers hitched up to preserve the crease, far enough to display his suspenders and hairless white calf. Her mother laying the table for supper, squeezing past the sideboard, wheezing as she reached across to pick up Mr Abinger’s tumbler and give it a rub on her apron.
Mrs Abinger’s face lit up, as it always did, and she said: ‘Well here’s our Jo. Nice time dear?’
Mr Abinger grunted: ‘You’re very late,’ as he always did, whether she were late or not. Josephine kissed her mother and hung her hat and coat behind the door, for there was no hall or lobby to the flat. There was no proper front door either; the only lock was on the street door below. Mrs Abinger had never liked it that if she were in the flat when the shop was open, anyone could walk up and barge right in on her.
Jo, who was as hungry as usual, asked what was for supper
and went through to her bedroom, which pleased her no more than it ever did when she came back from ‘Sheringham’. She opened the window and watched some girls with a skipping rope in the street. They seemed to be having fun, and Gert Hathaway called up to ask why she did not come down, but she would never play in the street again. She had gone beyond that.
At supper, she noticed that the spoons and forks were thin and tinny, and that the Worcester sauce had left brown rings on the cloth. The Grays always had little crochet mats and flowers from the garden on their dining-room table. Jo and her mother drank tea, and Mr Abinger drank beer, and after the meal, he took a toothpick from his waistcoat, used it, and inspected it with interest. While Mrs Abinger washed up, he sat down to do the accounts, and Jo got her satchel and sat at the other side of the table.
She liked doing her homework. It brought something of the importance of school into the insignificance of the flat. But she hated having nowhere to do it except the sitting-room. No wonder she got: ‘Careless, unconsidered work’ sometimes when she had to compete with her father totting up audibly, and her mother patting her shoulder as she passed, or peering over to say: ‘My goodness, the things you have to learn. I can’t make head nor tail of it.’
Sometimes her father would stretch a hand across the table and demand to see what she was doing. She was supposed to be gratified by his interest, but it was very annoying to have him passing censure on things he knew nothing about, and even, if she did not snatch the book away in time, making some alteration, which she had to remove afterwards with a licked rubber and a penknife.
There was no space in her bedroom for a table or a desk, even if she had one. At ‘Sheringham’ now, Pauline would be in solitary communion with her pen tray and her blotting pad and the geometry set which was complete, unlike Jo’s scrap lot jumbled up in an old date box. No wonder Pauline could draw such neat maps, she thought, as her father got up suddenly, jerking the table so that her mapping pen wavered the African coast all over the Indian Ocean.
Jo was bored by geography anyway, so she asked him: ‘Where are you going, Dad?’
‘To Ye Olde Sun in Splendour.’ He liked to dignify public houses by speaking of them in Olde Englishe. ‘I have an appointment with your uncle Reginald in the private bar.’
‘Can I come?’
‘Can you go to the Sun – at your age?’ cried Mrs Abinger, coming in to put away the cutlery. ‘Fancy asking such a thing!’
Mr Abinger chose to say: ‘Why shouldn’t she go out with her old dad, pray?’ He felt somewhat mellow, for Reg was going to give him his winnings on the three-thirty. Recently, though he could ill afford it, Mr Abinger had started to dabble delicately on the Turf. He never went to a meeting, or laid the bets himself. He knew nothing of the sport, but he got his tips from his brother Reg, and he was learning, studying the subject, he told himself, as a science.